| Every time unions negotiate with an employer they form a kind of partnership. Not that they share common objectives or class interest, but the reverse... |
nhs: our agenda for change
WORKERS, OCT 2004 ISSUE
Health service workers and their trade unions have developed plans to completely revitalise the pay of over a million-and-a-quarter health workers, offering them the greatest opportunity ever to take control of their working lives. Controlling your working life, the reason why most workers join a trade union, is the first step to controlling the rest of your life, a struggle for dignity and improvement. It begins locally, but if and when strength accrues then it becomes a national issue in which trade unions can bring influence to bear not just on isolated employers, but employers in a whole sector of the economy. That is what has been happening in the health service.
Change
Agenda for Change, as the pay improvements have become known, is also known as pay modernisation. For many people modernisation is a dirty word, and for understandable reasons. Under the guise of modernising, many intrusive and negative changes have been introduced to working lives.
Agenda for Change is being introduced by partnership working. For many, and for good reason, partnership also is a dirty word, having been associated with sweetheart single union deals involving no-strike clauses under the dark regime of Thatcher. So any consideration of Agenda for Change should first tackle head-on these two words, concepts, and put their meanings into context.
Workers and their trade unions in the health service have recognised the dependence of the government on improving NHS provision in order to survive in power.
Modernisation
To begin with, modernisation. Although the NHS pay system is 60 years old, that is not alone reason to change it. There may be chaos in the pay system but that has many benefits for workers as well as presenting many difficulties. Where workers are stronger, they do better. The same is true in reverse for employers. Where workers are weaker, employers do better and workers are exploited. It is this weakness of workers, and their exploitation, which we seek to eradicate. Attaching the word modernisation to this pay improvement should not mislead us into assuming a negative meaning.
Perhaps now is the time to call Agenda for Change "pay improvement in the NHS", for improvement it is. The overwhelming majority of NHS staff will gain not just an improved basic rate of pay, but also many hundreds of thousands will see a reduced working week and additional annual leave. Many of these in the lowest paid manual jobs. Do those opposing change not want to see manual workers with gains they themselves have enjoyed for years?
Improvements
You have to be wilful indeed not to see these changes as improvements. But there are many out there who do not, and seemingly want to see the ambitious and bold process, initiated by workers in their trade unions, fail. They have eagerly seen any real or perceived failing in the pay improvement strategy as proof that no improvement can be made.
Failure would perhaps in their twisted logic justify their decision not to assume responsibility for improving their own working lives. They want to leave it to others, and then carp from the sidelines when things go wrong. If things don't go wrong, then they have to contribute to making them go wrong. That is where honest opposition flips over into dishonest sabotage. Such has been the outcome of many recent developments in the Agenda for Change process.
Many opposed to the whole project have been involved in destabilising it at the twelve Early Implementer sites. For example, opponents crowed that Sunderland Healthcare Trust's alleged withdrawal from Agenda for Change was proof that the system cannot work. In truth, negotiators in Sunderland misapplied the Agenda for Change procedures, kept the results to themselves rather than discussing it with colleagues and made a dog's breakfast of the whole as a result. No doubt this will eventually be clear to all, but in the short term should not be allowed to deflect us from our objective: improved pay for NHS workers.
Sleight of hand
Similarly, attempts by London employers through sleight of hand to seek financial reimbursement by bumping up the number of people needing pay protection, rather than digging into their own coffers to pay recruitment and retention premiums, were seen through by Unison's national negotiators, but not by an embarrassingly large number in London Unison who chose to side with and believe the figures of employers rather than their own negotiators.
These are two among many examples of defects, not in the proposed new improved pay system, but in the capacity or willingness of some employers and workers to implement them. They should work to catch up, not hold back the NHS by resisting this change.
Partnership has had a bad press. Not surprising, since it was the weasel word used to signify submission to employers in the private sector by unions cravenly seeking advance through the disruption of industry and fellow trade unions. In an attempt to avoid the destruction wrought by such as Murdoch, the once-proud electricians' union pioneered partnership agreements in the print and other industries which involved them in the attempted disruption of print unions.
This is a matter which has been understood by workers for a generation. It is the kind of partnership foisted upon workers by rapacious employers seeking an unequal and exploitative relationship.
On the other hand, every time unions negotiate with an employer they form a kind of partnership. Not that they share common objective or class interest, but the reverse. They are signing a kind of truce between battles during which negotiation can regulate relations between them. That this truce will inevitably be broken, by the employers when we are weak, or by us when we are strong, sets the agenda for the next round of negotiations.
Partnership on our terms
Workers and their trade unions in the health service have recognised the dependence of the government on improving NHS provision in order to survive in power, and have skilfully exploited this. This is a partnership on our terms. We have insisted that the pay improvement can only take place with the co-operation of trade unions, which gives us a kind of veto. In parts of the NHS where unions have been excluded for generations, and newly established places also, recalcitrant employers have had to tolerate union intrusion. Indeed, in a welcome turnaround after 20 years of Thatcherism, employers now have to assist unions in recruiting both members and local representatives.
There have been isolated attempts by employers to pretend we share the same interest, suggesting that the sides of a negotiating committee (the employer's side, the trade union side) should cease to exist entirely and that there should simply be members of staff. This is a nonsense. Partnership is simply a means of regulating the relations between the sides, not a means of abolishing them. Few, if any, on the workers' side make this mistake and those on the employers' side who do are in for a shock. Should the outcome of these pay negotiations prove negative to workers then you will see no partnership.
On 7 October Unison's Special Health Conference will debate Agenda for Change and make a recommendation to its 450,000 members in the subsequent ballot. This recommendation must be to accept Agenda for Change.
That we have had to deal with problems of process and attempted sabotage is a choice, and a welcome development. That we have involved what will be a new generation of working class leaders in trade unions is perhaps the greater longer-term achievement. That we shall transform the working of the NHS under the control of workers is something hitherto not seen on such a scale. It is for this and future generations of health workers to build upon these historic achievements and to ensure that the health service becomes safe from attack.
Invulnerability, though, can never be assured as long as workers control only individual sectors of the economy, but not the economy itself. For that our control as a class must be more pervasive; we would have to have political power for that to be. So let us consider this, and how to get it. We need not just to be close to the levers of power, we must know how to take hold of and wield them.
Continuing to lead
We have raised our heads and engaged in a great undertaking. We have not let ourselves or our generation of health workers down, and have exceeded expectations. We have done this through courage and boldness and a refusal to be deflected. Unison must continue to lead, calling on all its members to accept and extend control of our working lives through a vote to improve pay in the NHS.
