Picketing in Cardiff on Wednesday during the junior doctors’ strike in Wales (Picture: @Seren_Boyd on Twitter)
Around 3,000 junior doctors in Wales started a 72-hour walkout at 7am on Wednesday. It comes after doctors rejected the Labour-led Welsh government’s offer of a 5 percent pay rise, Their BMA union called the offer the “worst in the UK”.
As the walkout began, BMA junior doctors’ committee co-chairs Dr Oba Babs-Osibodu and Dr Peter Fahey slammed over a decade of pay stagnation. “Junior doctors in Wales have experienced a pay cut of 29.6 percent in real terms over the last 15 years,” they said in a statement.
“We aren’t asking for a pay rise. We are asking for our pay to be restored in line with inflation back to 2008 levels, when we began to receive pay cuts in real terms.”
The strike saw strong picketing in ten areas the BMA had focused on. Those on the picket lines included Gwenllian Roberts, a first-year junior doctor making just over £27,000 a year, outside Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor in north Wales.
She told BBC News that she sympathised with patients who have an appointment postponed because of the strike. “But it’s about the longevity of the system,” she said. “Many more thousands of people are missing their clinic appointments because of waiting lists or spending hours waiting because junior doctors are moving away.”
Craig George-McDowall, picketing in Cardiff, was worried doctors are leaving for England already due to better pay and conditions. “Why would people choose Wales? Why are we worth less?’ he told the BMA’s Doctor Magazine.
Nearly everywhere, pickets were resentful that a Labour administration is offering them less than the Tories have been forced to in England or the Scottish government is offering.
“It makes you wonder what a Labour government in Westminster would really be like,” said a picket at Wrexham Maelor hospital. “I don’t think they are going to meet our demands,” she said.
Another strike—this time for four days—is set for 25 to 29 March unless there’s an acceptable offer.
Junior doctors in England have scheduled strikes to start on Saturday at 7am until 11.59pm next Wednesday, a total of five days.
BMA leaders offered to call off strikes if the government or bosses agreed to increase the period during which doctors are allowed to hold strikes by four weeks.
Such an extension, which is allowed under the anti-union laws, would give “more time to talk, and for the government to present a credible offer,” said the BMA. But the Tories and bosses spurned such a deal.
Unfortunately, the BMA is not publicising serious picketing. It says, “There will be three main ‘super’ picket lines for this round of strikes, on Monday 26 February, 8am-11am at St Thomas Hospital, London, Manchester Royal Infirmary and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham.”
In some local areas doctors are organising pickets as well. But the union should be pushing for much more.
Instead, in a highly defensive move, the BMA tells its members, “Picket too far away? For this round of strikes we are asking doctors to help out with blood shortages by donating blood.”
The government won’t be moved by intermittent strikes—or blood donations. There’s a danger the walkouts are occasional events directed mainly at hoping for change if Keir Starmer becomes prime minister.
The doctors’ strikes should be part of a much wider battle over NHS pay. All the health unions are now launching claims for the 2024 pay round—which is supposed to be introduced in April.
All the health union leaders should push for a rise well above inflation and which claws back the real-terms cuts over years. And they should campaign for strikes by everyone from porters to doctors to win this.
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