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A couple of years ago I said I thought the junior doctors pay settlement was a bad deal.
It was not a '20% pay rise' in the way was reported and didn’t get close to the 35% that the strike was all about.
It was a two year deal.
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2023/24; an average increase of around 4.05%, backdated to April 2023, on top of the 9% the Conservatives had already ‘imposed’.
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2024/25; the DDReview 6% increase, backdated to April 2024.
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Plus a £1,000 consolidated bung,
The bigger problem, as I wrote at the time;
‘… what happens in the third year? By then… Labour will be struggling with poor economic growth. Taxes will be up. Access to benefits will be at the centre of more rows.’
Striking doctors had lost a shedload of money… remember, the BMA didn’t pay strike pay. HMG pushed the big money problem back into another financial year.
It was a fudge. Streeting got lucky and the BMA got the jitters.
I wrote;
‘… migrant boats will have tailed-off in the winter months… the lure of the Albion won’t go away. Everything will get going again in the calm waters of the spring.
Public patience will have worn thin...
... SillyBoy will be distracted, trying to pull together a ten year plan that’s different to the last 10 year plan.
He won’t be making much headway in reducing waiting-lists.
… resident-doctors will still be looking for pay restoration of 35%. Including interim-inflation, they’ll be looking for a third year increase something north of 15%.
Their militant leadership will know there’s unfinished business… teeing-up another round of strikes.
HMG will be on the back-foot. Dare they risk more strikes? One thing is for sure… the BMA will.’
I don’t regurgitate any of this to pretend I know better or claim any superior insight… it was obvious.
Streeting, the DH+ and the Treasury must have known this could have been avoided with a proper three year deal.
Now… we’re back where we started.
That said... the new militant BMA have turned out to be no better than their predecessors in managing industrial relations and negotiating a decent deal.
The reason Junior/Resident Dr’s pay fell so far behind was the BMA was for too long, asleep at the wheel. They let successive governments get away with exploitative pay deals.
The BMA have done it again. They should have stuck out for a three year deal.
Now they’re on the back foot, public opinion is turning against them and Streeting is claiming the moral high ground and talking tough.
Already, he sounds like the Conservative health secretary predecessor, Steve Barclay, whose intransigence ignited the last strike.
We know this will end in talks... Streeting should start now. It will be very silly not to start talking today. All disputes end in talks
If he is brave, a proper politician, not just a ministerial carpetbagger, and a real change-maker... he should try and capture the spirit of Labour’s 1969 policy paper, In Place of Strife, that tried to reform industrial relations.
If Starmer's Labour is serious about change and reshaping Britain, how about a ‘no strike deal’?
No strike deals, sometimes called final-offer-arbitration, depend on pendulum arbitration. Each side presents their case, much they way they do to the Pay Review Bodies. The arbitration body, such as ACAS, choses one case or the other.
It has the effect of limiting excesses in demands and stupid offers.
Each side is legally obligated to accept the outcome.
If we are serious about putting patients first, Labour are serious about modernisation and ‘change’ and if we are all serious about ‘replacing strife’ in the workplace…
… let’s get serious.
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