Northern Care Alliance strikers call for national campaign
North West Socialist Party members
Unison members in theatre departments at the Northern Care Alliance Foundation Trust (NCA) in Greater Manchester continued their strike action over overtime pay on 23 and 24 July.
NHS pay has been degraded year on year, with no pay rises followed by below-inflation pay rises, and now another cost-of-living crisis.
This elevated previous grumblings among workers about the imposition of a new ‘NHS Professionals (NHSP)’ system for workers to access overtime to an all-out dispute.
In June, NCA critical care staff accepted an employer offer that was a partial victory. It restored access to the previous overtime arrangements, except for the lowest-paid workers.
Perhaps that potentially divisive offer gave an indication of the employers’ response to the similar grievance from theatre staff. Directly before their July action, the Trust withdrew a tabled offer, and then from all negotiations to resolve the dispute.
Striking members told us that at first they were surprised at their employer refusing to talk. But that surprise was quickly replaced with anger and a resolute demand to fight for their workplace rights.
Strikers told us: “We aren’t asking for anything silly or special.” They are quite right! These workers, a majority of whom worked frontline through Covid, putting themselves and their families at risk, are simply demanding their employer pays them the overtime rates already nationally agreed through Agenda for Change (AfC).
Currently the NCA and many other NHS trusts are forcing staff to undertake overtime through NHSP, a private company wholly owned by the Department of Health, on reduced overtime rates, meaning staff are offered less than their substantive pay to undertake overtime.
And some of these overtime shifts are not an option. When theatre lists run over, in order to get the patients’ surgery completed, the staff stay
over their planned shift time. The employer simply expects it, maybe because NHS staff are ‘angels’. Well, angels don’t have to face the mortal reality of a food shop cost that’s more than doubled, crazy rents and mortgage payment levels, fuel costs through the roof!
While there is mounting pressure on NHS workers’ ability to meet the cost of living, NHSP posted profits of £11.4 million last year.
Whilst we were at the picket an inpatient came out of their ward to support the strike and signed the petition. Members of the public gave their support and donated to the strike fund.
Public social media posts on the strike have said that the ‘King of the North’ claimed he “didn’t like NHS outsourcing and this can’t sit with a government looking to extend and protect workers’ rights”.
Burnham
Too true. What will Burnham’s promise of a “change of direction” and being “unashamedly Labour” mean for hardworking NHS workers who are simply demanding that they are paid under agreed terms and conditions?
Pickets told us that a theatre strike meeting unanimously agreed that the strike committee will demand that the Unison Health Service Group Executive convenes a meeting of all branches in or moving towards dispute. This is a national issue, not limited to NCA or to theatres.
Any resolution has to include the reintroduction of AfC overtime, wholly paid for from fully funded central health budgets.
Dates for future strike action will be announced; solidarity messages to unisonnca@nca.nhs.uk
