NURSES’ vote to strike at hospitals across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is a historic first for the Royal College of Nursing (RCN).
It signals a massive extension of the strike wave, taking it into the heart of Britain’s biggest employer and most cherished public service, the NHS.
Many of the issues facing nurses are the same as for all workers: RCN general secretary Pat Cullen’s warning that “our members will no longer tolerate a financial knife-edge at home and a raw deal at work” reflects a sentiment felt by millions.
Strikes will hit a majority of NHS employers — all of them in Scotland and Northern Ireland, all but one in Wales, and most of the larger ones in England.
Where nurses will not strike this is because of Tory ballot thresholds imposed in 2016, a reminder of the immense organisational work that must now go into delivering strike votes, but also a stark illustration to tens of thousands of health workers of the double standard that imposes far higher bars on workers seeking to strike than on the election of politicians.
All the poisonous propaganda we are used to seeing rolled out against strikers will be turned on nurses — and then some.
Where Establishment media depicts posties or rail workers trying to defend their pay, terms and conditions as selfish wreckers disrupting essential services, nurses will be accused of putting lives at risk — though they will continue to provide emergency and urgent care.
The reality is that NHS strikes are just as much about protecting the service’s future as are those in mail and rail — and nurses who voted to walk out are acting to protect patient safety.
More than a decade of shrinking real-terms pay has caused a nursing exodus.
The Tory assumption that health workers could like it or lump it because there was an endless supply of cheap skilled labour to be imported from abroad has been shattered by Brexit and the Covid pandemic. There are 47,000 unfilled registered nurse posts in NHS England alone.
The health service is in crisis. Waiting lists for treatment exceed seven million.
There is no plausible way to tackle this emergency without significant increases in investment, including in the workforce that Rishi Sunak clapped from the steps of No 11 Downing Street as the heroes on the coronavirus front line.
Cullen points to next week’s Autumn Statement as a chance for ministers to signal that this investment is coming. So far, the Tories have trailed a new round of spending cuts, a recipe for collapse across multiple public services. They have to be stopped.
They can be. Anti-strike propaganda becomes less effective as strikes spread across the economy.
When workers across multiple sectors are striking, it becomes harder to portray industrial action as wrecking tactics by a minority.
And the RCN cannot be accused of being “the usual suspects.” Like the ongoing ballot for action by head teachers in the NAHT, their vote shows that new groups of workers are being brought into industrial confrontation with our rulers.
Public sympathy for strikes — already high — can be even higher for health workers, given the recent experience of the pandemic and widespread awareness of the sacrifices they made.
But sympathy — even visible support on picket lines — will not be enough. The demand for a new deal must become a political challenge that politicians — Labour as well as Tory — ignore at their peril.
A united movement for higher pay and higher public spending, funded by taxing the billionaire class and the oil and gas giants, can be built from the strike wave.
The TUC’s backing for last weekend’s People’s Assembly march through London was a positive sign.
We have work to do across the movement to cement alliances between workers and campaigning organisations and turn this wave of disputes into a force for real change.
