ON INTERNATIONAL Nurses Day it is important to recognise the central role nurses play in running front-line NHS services and to acknowledge that their struggle for decent pay is central to the battle to stop the cuts and privatisation steamroller that threatens to destroy free healthcare for good.

Nurses of all grades contributed to the pandemic response and in London there was such a shortage of trained and experienced nurses that NHS trusts were forced to increase the bank pay rates in order to ensure that wards and units could deliver care. Nursing care was in such short supply that some doctors stepped in to fill the gap left by nursing shortages.

Student nurses who have had the terms and conditions of their training contracts eroded over several decades without so much as a whimper of opposition by the trade union movement, found themselves thrown in at the deep end delivering life-saving care for free in ICUs and other coronavirus areas. The student nurses were sold the familiar line that gaining “pandemic experience” is a more important consideration than pay. The student nurses  were also told that their families were not eligible for a death in service pay scheme even though they were risking their lives. Many became unwell and some, like Ade Raymond, died.

The 4 per cent pay offer in Scotland represents an astute political attempt to divide the solidarity achieved by nurses and other NHS staff created during the NHSPay15 campaign. The truth is that the NHS cuts and privatisation strategy, supported by all governments including those in the devolved nations, would be set back by a significant restorative pay rise of 15 per cent.

Those who sit right at the helm of running the NHS along with their partners in government are absolutely committed to the full privatisation of the health service.

These managers and government leaders know that the wage bill, the biggest proportion of NHS expenditure, must be kept as low as possible so that private companies will then be incentivised to bid for NHS contracts.

No private company wants to erode their profit margin by paying higher wages than they need to so delaying pay rises and holding down NHS pay is deliberate.

So too is demoralising NHS staff because the exit of experienced staff means that services fail and can then be “rescued” by private providers and these companies can then hire new staff on cheaper contracts which offer lower pay, basic statutory sick pay and the basic NEST pension.

Core care is at increased risk of being privatised and this will affect nurses and other clinical staff. 

Any ex-NHS facilities worker now TUPED (transferred to a new employer under the Transfer of Undertakings – Protection of Employment regulations) over to a private company can tell you that the promises made at the start soon given way to repeated issues with pay being short, bullying and harassment, job cuts, hours cuts and new hires coming into employment who are treated even worse.

They will tell you about the lack of equal opportunities for black and Asian people and how the white friends and family of company managers are parachuted into all of the senior supervisory and management positions. They can outline in detail the deliberate divisions fostered by private companies that undermine the ability for trade unions to organise effectively.

It is important for NHS staff, particularly nurses, to recognise that the privatisation of the NHS is now at an advanced stage and that safety standards and the ethics that are central to nursing care are completely undermined by privatisation.

This Tory government plans to further undermine professional standards by deregulating the professional bodies, as is outlined in detail in the NHS white paper.

To date NHS trade unions are only scratching the surface in terms of mounting any sort of serious challenge to cuts and privatisation already taking hold in the NHS.

Far too many toxic restructures that slash front-line services, downgrade experienced nurses or make them redundant go though without trade union opposition.

There is still a widespread acceptance that private cash and income generation is the way forward to finance the NHS. Equally there is not sufficient understanding that demands for government funding for the NHS are pretty shallow, when these funds are channelled into the private sector rather than improving pay, terms and conditions of those who are actually delivering the services to patients and the public.

Many NHS trusts have already set up Wholly Owned Subsidiaries (WOS) and TUPED staff over to them with the intention of breaking away from nationally agreed NHS terms and conditions (set out in the Agenda for Change).

But challenging the formation of a WOS is possible as GMB members demonstrated when they took successful strike action in Frimely NHS. It is important for nurses to get on with the difficult work of building their trade union strength within their own workplaces because this has been proven to be the only way to deal effectively with the corporate managers taking over every area of the NHS.

The next few years are critical in the struggle to defend the NHS and defending nurses’ pay, terms and conditions goes hand in hand with stopping NHS privatisation.

Any Labour MP or trade unionist who does not understand how the NHS is being softened up for privatisation is sleeping at the wheel and must be robustly challenged. We must be clear that given the risks to staff and patients those who fail to oppose privatisation  are themselves part of the problem.

On International Nurses Day nurses everywhere must put themselves first for a change and get behind the struggle for no less than a 15 per cent pay rise.

This is a fair and just settlement for all of the effort nurses have made to deliver for us during the pandemic.

And the demand for a 15 per cent restorative pay rise for nurses and all NHS workers must be interwoven into any strategy to defend the NHS from privatisation.

Every NHS campaigning organisation, every trade union and the Labour Party itself must boldly embrace the demand for a 15 per cent pay rise for NHS staff because investment in the pay of front-line staff is now critical to reverse the growing recruitment crisis and  preventing the collapse of the NHS.

Helen O’Connor is Southern Region organiser for GMB.