Exhausted and reluctant, nurses are on strike again on Wednesday and Thursday in England, continuing an unprecedented movement to win better wages and working conditions, in a United Kingdom faced with high inflation.
These new days of mobilization testify to the deadlock in the negotiations between the main nurses’ union, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the conservative government of Rishi Sunak: after two days of strike action in December, an unprecedented century of existence of the union, two more strike days are announced for February.
The government refuses the increases that the RCN demands to at least compensate for inflation which reached 10.5% in December, a very slight drop compared to November (10.7%).
“It’s such a hard job right now,” Orla Dooley, 29, ten of whom worked as a nurse, told AFP.
Like a third of public sector nurses and midwives according to a YouGov poll on Wednesday, she would choose another profession if it had to be done again. This job, “it’s something I loved, it’s really sad”.
She is not on strike this Wednesday, but is joining the picket after her night shift at St. George’s Hospital in London. It often lacks “10, 12 nurses”, or half of the planned workforce, she underlines, the problems of patient safety do not arise only on strike days, but “every day”.
The fate of patients is at the center of their concerns, assure the strikers.
minimum duty
The government, which wants to pass a law establishing a minimum service in certain sectors, including health, denounces the disruption that these strikes will cause for the population in the middle of winter.
Going on strike is “the last thing you want to do”, explains Steven Bedford, mental health support worker, “we know that the emergency room is probably going to have a hard time today”. “But we have to be heard.”
With “47,000 vacancies” in England, “I don’t know how the government is going to do” to establish a minimum service, argued RCN General Secretary Pat Cullen on the ITV channel.
Granting “unaffordable” wage hikes would mean “reduced patient care and fuel inflation that would make us all poorer,” Health Minister Steve Barclay argued in a column in the newspaper. The Independent.
He pleaded for a “constructive dialogue” with the unions and wants to reach an agreement on minimum service so that “patients are always protected”.
According to him, the two-day nurses’ walkout in December led to the cancellation of 30,000 operations and appointments.
According to the NHS Confederation, which represents hospitals, this new strike could lead to the cancellation of 4,500 operations and 25,000 appointments.
“damaging conflict”
Its chairman, Matthew Taylor, called on the government to “do everything it can to end this damaging conflict” for the public health service, the NHS.
“We don’t think this is the right way to act, we continue to call on the unions to leave the picket lines and continue the discussions,” said a spokesman for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, also referring to the upcoming teachers’ strike from 1er February, to which will be added a new walkout by the railway workers.
The nurses movement is the most popular of all that has rocked the UK in recent months, facing its worst social crisis in decades.
According to a poll published Wednesday by Ipsos for the PA agency, 57% of Britons believe that the government is most to blame for the length of the nurses’ strike.
82% of respondents have sympathy for nurses and 80% for paramedics, another health profession on strike in recent weeks.
90% also express their sympathy for the patients, whose strikes are disrupting care a little more, in a public health system already damaged by years of underfunding and the COVID-19 pandemic.