Ambulance workers will strike again on Monday as junior doctors announce their first walkouts in March across Britain’s National Health Service.
(Bloomberg) — Ambulance workers will strike again on Monday as junior doctors announce their first walkouts in March across Britain’s National Health Service.
The GMB labor group is staging a walkout by ambulance staff throughout England, while members of the Unite union join the protest in the west Midlands and the north of the country.
Junior doctors represented by the Hospital Consultants & Specialists Association announced Sunday they would strike for the first time in their history on March 15. The British Medical Association, which represents 45,000 junior doctors, is set to announce strike dates as soon as Monday when the results of a ballot will be known.
Emergency workers in Wales are also on strike after last week rejecting a 5.5% pay increase with a 1.5% bonus.
Strikes across the NHS are showing no signs of abating with nurses announcing wider and longer strikes to come at the start of March. The government has insisted it won’t negotiate beyond the raises recommended by pay review bodies last year, which fall short of the UK’s rate of inflation.
“It’s time the prime minister ditched his ‘do nothing’ strategy for dealing with escalating strikes across the NHS,” said Christina McAnea, Unison’s general secretary, in a statement last week. She argued that workers throughout Britain should get raises as high as those offered by Scotland’s devolved administration.
Unison said Friday that thousands more ambulance workers voted to strike, as well as staff in other areas of the NHS such as its blood and transplant division.
‘Historic mistake’
The vote from the BMA is due to a dispute over pay with staff seeking a raise above the 2% they are receiving for the current year. The ballot by the HCSA, a smaller union, saw 97% of its junior doctors vote in favor of industrial action, on a 75% turnout.
Professor Philip Banfield, the BMA’s most senior doctor, told a young doctors’ conference on Sunday that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Steve Barclay are on the precipice of an “historic mistake” in refusing to enter meaningful negotiations.
“This government, with its silence and disregard for our highly skilled and expert workforce, is consciously and deliberately overseeing the demise of the NHS at a point when it is needed most,” Banfield said.
Junior doctors have been subjected to a decade of real-terms pay cuts amounting to more than 26%, HCSA President Dr Naru Narayanan said in a statement.
–With assistance from Alice Gledhill.
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