In second round of consultation ballots by the biggest health unions on NHS pay, RCN members in England voted 89% for action short of strike and 54% for strike action. Unison members voted 77% in favour of industrial action.
Unsurprisingly the turnouts haven’t improved significantly since the first round of consultations, 23% for the RCN and an unannounced (but similar) figure in Unison. We’re told that very few branches reached the 45% level that the Unison health service group Executive had set to trigger a formal ballot. The GMB formal ballot, which is being run on a disaggregated basis, closes on 15 December. The expectation here is also for a strong yes vote, but with few branches reaching 50%, meaning it’s unlikely that action will follow.
The trade union laws have done their job and stood in the way of workers angry about a measly pay award. The union bureaucracies, in turn, have lent on the laws to justify their lack of action.
The street protests organised by Nurses United and NHS Workers Say No! in the summer of 2020 gave optimism to the start to the pay campaign. It was deliberately leached away, particularly by the Unison leadership, which refused to back any protests associated with the 15% demand of NHS Workers Say No, refused to make a recommendation to reject the award, ran two informal ballots over the same issue, and put very little resource into turning out the vote.
The low consultation and ballot turnouts, across all unions, also reflect a longstanding weakness in the levels of trade union organisation with the NHS. If in fact very few branches have been able to reach any where near threshold votes, the weakness is widespread.
Yet large numbers of health workers, across all unions, have voted repeatedly for action. We must demand a full breakdown of voting figures from our unions so that we can see where our strength lies. The establishment of local and national activist networks through NHS Workers Say No! will be important in organising these members and taking the fight into the unions nationally.
Preparation for the pay campaign for 2022/23 needs to be started immediately. The government have already sent signals by setting the NHS pay review body report for 22 May, a month after the pay award is due, and stating that any pay increase will come from existing budgets. We must demand that in the year ahead our unions make a united pay claim that recompenses members for over ten years of pay cuts.
Alongside the ongoing pay campaign we must fight on issues of workload, health and safety, job threats, privatisation, and against the continued breakup of the NHS. We must demand that our unions, and especially the newly-elected left National Executive Committee of Unison, build campaigns and protests on those issues and feed them into a concerted strategy for rebuilding union organisation.
