NHS – Employers seek pay freeze
WORKERS, APR 2006 ISSUE
NHS Employers are hiding behind the government-created financial crisis in the NHS to try to impose a pay freeze. By linking staff pay to the non-negotiable Pay Review Body, the employers and government are trying to ensure all NHS staff lose the right to negotiate over wages. By agreeing to a three-year pay deal while Agenda for Change was being introduced, NHS staff are in effect being primed not to expect to negotiate over pay.
There are hints that arrears owed to staff arising from the Agenda for Change assimilation may be delayed until 2007. So, no negotiations on pay, a pay ceiling of 2% imposed by the government and a blunt statement from the NHS employers that "the system as set out in the Agenda for Change agreement is not workable".
With a record £800 million NHS deficit, despite record money being pumped into the NHS, ward closures, redundancies, restructurings, moves towards greater privatisation and introduction of wider market economics in the NHS, the collapse of PFI, a major threat to NHS Pensions and now an attack on wages, many NHS staff can be forgiven for a feeling of déjà vu, as they witness a return to the Thatcherism of the early 1980s.