Everybody OUT!

Or, when to strike , and when... it might be better not to

My mother, who is 86, very recently spent a week in hospital, suffering with a number of symptoms all rooted in one serious, underlying issue. My daughter is beginning her second year as a nurse in a hospital in Edinburgh. My own medical notes might well be tome-like following a history over the past 25 years of pneumonia, numerous bronchial problems following on from that, two doses of Covid, etc etc. My dad, who is 90, has had two hip replacements and a stroke, while my youngest brother has just returned to work having had one hip done. My younger brother was ill for several months this year with pernicious anemia. If I were to reference the extended family, I could go on for several hundred words more. But you get the idea.

The NHS, then, occupies a central space in my own life and in the lives of many close to me. That will be the case for many. I will avoid piety by not offering an encomium on the care, expertise and commitment of the very large majority of the staff we’ve all encountered. I will, however, defend myself against any charges of ingratitude when I say that the news that resident doctors are about to go on strike boils my water just a bit.

There’s no doubt that resident doctors in the NHS are underpaid. They have been for many years, and the consequences are as you might expect. Fewer bright kids are choosing medicine as a career, and increasing numbers of young doctors are choosing once qualified to practice in countries where they will be much better paid to work in better funded, better organised health systems where the outcomes for their patients will be better. (The same choice, I should say, is being made by some young teachers, though perhaps to a lesser extent.)

My sympathies are with them, really. Their pain is mine. Of my 34 years as a teacher I spent 22 as a head of department, and 11 of those years fell during austerity when our salaries did not improve at all. I was on £39k in 2008, and I was on £39k in 2019, by which time the value of that salary had been eroded by around 25%. There has been a partial recovery since - were I not retired I would now be on £64K - which was the result of, apart from the gratitude, natural goodwill and sense of justice always present among our political leaders, our supporting our pay claims with industrial action. And it looks like there will likely be more action by Scottish teachers to come, in pursuit of improvements in conditions promised long ago but of course long delayed.

But but but: there are strikes and there are strikes. Industrial action can be simultaneously entirely justified and unintelligently deployed. Public sympathy can be either enhanced or lost. Discussing striking doctors can take us to that place where, in the words of a podcast I was listening to earlier this week, nuance goes to die. I get the impression that many doctors are meeting there as we speak.

I do not say that doctors can never strike. I personally struck twice in support of better pay. The first time was for a single day, after which a compromise was negotiated. I hoped that would be my entire history of strike action but as it was, a few years later I was out again. And I have to say both that I was more vehement in my attitudes by then - I was one of the small minority who voted against accepting the revised offer which saw us return to work - but also that I appreciated the intelligence with which the action had been organised. I had spent many earlier years wondering why I was paying my union subs, but they all seemed worth it in that period.

On each day over the period of the action, teachers came out on strike in two of Scotland’s 32 local authority areas. (There was the prospect, if the strikes were to continue, of targeting those areas in which key Cabinet Secretaries had their seats for more frequent strikes.) This balanced the need to maximise media coverage while managing both teacher commitment - for many did not, perhaps could not afford to forgo too much in the way of lost salaries - and public support.

For retaining public sympathy, as far as possible, must be a priority for public sector unions. That relationship, with people who do after all, as I was sometimes reminded, pay our salaries, doesn’t preclude the right to take action and certainly not the right to be unionised, which surely should be a universal right and a necessary balance in an environment ever more biased in favour of employers. But it is a relationship which has to be maintained, and which will change over time. I began teaching in an era when the opinions on the profession I heard and was offered were far from being unanimously positive. We were not long past the Bad Old Days when schools were often authoritarian, when the needs of the majority of pupils were often not really catered for at all and when many people left as soon as possible thinking their time in school had been wasted. Memories of the long teacher strikes of the 1970s and 1980s no doubt didn’t help either. Things began to change soon after, and for most of my career what I heard were appreciations of how teaching must be a difficult job: but by the time I left that was changing again, among for example some who had become entitled enough to feel whatever demands they made must be acceded to. Doctors will of course have their own histories of public interaction to retell. I do remember that our striking even for one day every three weeks did annoy many who had to reorganise child care, or take days off work when that couldn’t be done, as well as those who felt that their children’s learning was being impacted. As, inevitably, it was.

My point would be that that annoyance was manageable, an acceptable risk at the time. I would never have struck in the run up to exams because that would not have been the case, Neither is striking in December, at peak flu time - and this year’s flu is apparently especially bad. That speaks of a union, and by association union members, cynical enough to strike when the public service they provide is most needed. A service which in this case focusses on minimising deaths among the elderly and other vulnerable patients. It is not a good look, and not smart. What will be seen by most are people who will go on to have what by most standards are still comfortable, if not lucrative incomes, leveraging their demands by disregarding the lethal consequences of their action. What is supposed to happen to goodwill and public support after that?