Everyone loves nurses, don’t they? They are near the top of the list of the nation’s most admired and trusted workers. They inspired a TV drama called Angels. And when they were striking in December, January and February, they were the NHS staff group that the health secretary, Steve Barclay, most wanted to make peace with.
But since the Royal College of Nursing decided to launch a new series of strikes in England after its members rejected a pay deal their leadership had recommended, the government is playing hardball with the union. Rishi Sunak and Barclay plan to make no new improved offer to either NHS nurses or junior doctors, whose four-day strike ended last Saturday and led to 195,000 cancellations.
The RCN’s first walkouts were so well handled and non-disruptive of life-or-death services such as A&E and intensive care that Barclay publicly complimented them for being so helpful, which is a dubious honour for a striking union. However, this time the RCN’s leadership seems to be following the junior doctors’ playbook. Unlike its predecessors, next time it will “strike hard”, in union-speak. The RCN’s next stoppage – from 30 April to 2 May, over the May Day bank holiday weekend – will continue 24/7 and involve no “derogations” – or exemptions for particular types of NHS care.
On Sunday, Pat Cullen, the RCN’s articulate and redoubtable leader, warned that renewed stoppages by nurses could go on until Christmas.
Cullen is nobody’s fool. She has the distinction of having led the first-ever strike by nurses in the UK – in her native Northern Ireland in late 2019 – and to a successful conclusion to boot. During weeks-long negotiations in March, a combination of Cullen’s personal charm and the membership’s backing helped her to persuade Barclay to improve on a pay offer for 2022-23 and 2023-24 that he had insisted for weeks could not be made more generous.
But she must know that despite her tough talk, the RCN’s chances of getting a second successive strike mandate from its members, and thus pursuing a prolonged campaign of industrial action, are much smaller now than when it got the first “yes” vote in last November.
Simple mathematics shows why. On Friday, the RCN said 54% of members who voted in a ballot had rejected the deal it agreed with the government last month and 46% had voted to accept it. On the back of that result, the RCN decided to resume striking, despite only a narrow majority opposing the deal.
Trade union law requires unions to get a 50% turnout from their membership and that 50% of votersback strike action before any walkout is legal. Only 61% of RCN members bothered to voted in the recent ballot. Again, simple mathematics shows that 54% of 61% equals just 33% of the RCN’s entire membership. Or, more crudely, just one in three members are sufficiently dissatisfied with the terms of the improved deal to reject it.
That must make it more likely that the reballot for or against strike action that the RCN will have to stage within weeks – each mandate only runs for six months – will this time deny the union the legal right to “strike until Christmas”.
Other NHS unions have identified this potential problem for the RCN. There is also the fact – highlighted by one strategist at another union – that the RCN has decided to make any reballot an England-wide national vote this time, rather than the more cumbersome workplace-based one used last autumn. That will further reduce the chances of a second “yes” for strike action, because such votes, less prone to the influence of usually more outspoken workplace activists, are likely to favour the hand of those urging acceptance of the terms on offer.
The latter camp includes Cullen, who wrote a blog explaining to RCN members why they should accept the deal. “Despite it not being what we all know nursing fully deserves, we would lose too much by rejecting it in full,” the pragmatic Cullen wrote.
Barclay has spotted this weakness. That’s why this time he’s playing hardball.
