Anger is brewing among British hospital staff. On Thursday March 4, the approximately 280,000 nurses at the NHS, the public hospital, learned that the Department of Health was only recommending a symbolic 1% increase in their salary for the year 2021, around 3.50 pounds sterling (4 euros) more per week. Barely enough to compensate for inflation (expected at 1.5% this year), or even pay for parking spaces in hospitals, which are most of the time not free for staff.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), one of the profession’s historic unions, has said it is ready for action for the first time in… one hundred and five years, and that he had even built a pot of 35 million pounds to finance his future movement. “No nurse likes this type of action, but we have to prepare”, explained Donna Kinnair, the union’s general secretary at the BBC. The RCN is calling for a 12.5% revaluation. Unite, the main British union, consults its base, as do the other big powerhouses GMB and Unison. A massive strike would be a first in a country where work stoppages are rare, especially in the hospital public service.
Like doctors, paramedics and nursing aides, nurses have been on the front line since the start of the pandemic. They ran out of masks in the spring of 2020, they suffered a brutal second wave – more than 47,000 deaths linked to the coronavirus since 1er January 2021. Many have caught the disease, many have died (more than 150 in 2020). They are now exhausted and chronically understaffed. “This 1% increase is a real slap in the face”, testifies Matthew Tovey, a Welsh nurse, who ” off hook [sa] qualification just at the start of the pandemic ”.
“Being a nurse is a passion”
Reached by phone, this member of the Unite union is one of the first to have demanded a 15% salary increase (now supported by the GMB and Unite unions), “Last summer, when we learned about the salary increases for members of the House of Commons [ils ont bénéficié d’une augmentation de 3 000 livres sterling par an] “. He started an online petition (“Claps don’t pay the bills” – “Applause does not pay our bills”, on the Change.org platform), which has gathered nearly 500,000 signatories. “I have worked for the NHS for over ten years, but I earn less today than I started in real terms”, regrets Matthew, who tells “A very hard year. We had such shortages of personnel that we had to take care of at least twice as many patients. I suffer from anxiety, a lot of colleagues are the same ”.
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