Resident doctors’ strike ‘a long time coming’

Resident doctors during their last strike (Photo: Guy Smallman)

Resident doctors in England are set to strike for five days next month in a hard hitting move by the BMA union. The strike is planned to start on Friday 14 November and last until the following Wednesday.

Resident doctors, previously known as junior doctors, make up around half of all doctors in the health service and play a vital role in patient care.

Dr Jack Fletcher, chair of the BMA’s resident doctors committee, called on health secretary Wes Streeting to “come forward with a proper offer on jobs, on pay”.

She said the dispute was no longer just about salaries, but now also about the “scandal of doctors going unemployed”. Resident doctors’ pay continued its freefall despite last year’s backdated two-year deal worth an average of about 22 percent.

Streeting this year offered an average of just 4 percent. That means pay is still down by more than a fifth since 2008 when set against the RPI measure of inflation.

Now, in addition to poor wages, resident doctors face growing job insecurity, with the BMA recording that some 34 percent of them did not have a firm job offer or regular locum work lined up for this year.

Dennis, a resident doctor training to become a GP in London, told Socialist Worker that the strike announcement was “a long time coming”. And, he says, that most of his colleagues think the government was “stringing the union along” in order to waste its six-month strike mandate.

That’s not the only way that bosses and the government have tried to undermine the doctors’ action.

Strikes—and how we can win them

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“There’s lots of reports of Trusts saying the strike is unsafe, and that consultant cover is not available on strike days, which it always is,” says Dennis.

“The Trusts themselves are under huge pressure from the government, and Streeting and his team want to minimise the impact of the strike.”

But Dennis says that the right wing press’s talk of “strike fatigue” is nonsense. “The figures for the last strike day, in July, show it was really well supported. There was a great turnout on picket lines, and lots of people participated.”

Doctors’ growing anger reflects the wider crisis in the NHS, says Dennis.

“There’s a sense among me and my colleagues that the job’s not really what it was and it’s not what we signed up for,” he says. “It seems like everything’s being cut to the bone.

“Yes, it’s great when you can actually do your job. But what really demotivates us is the conditions we’re forced to work in.

“The pay issue is in reality the canary in the coal mine. And that’s in people’s minds when they choose to strike.”

Dennis says that disillusionment with the Labour government is also playing a role in doctors’ strong support for action. “I think we accepted last year’s pay deal because the union wanted to show it was willing to work with the new Labour government.

“We thought it wanted to try and make the health service better. And Labour suggested it would work towards the BMA’s demand of pay restoration.

“But I think that feeling has gone now, and Labour is a lot less popular.”

With the pay of all health workers under attack, Dennis thinks that everyone should “stick together”. “We’re all in the same situation, both in terms of pay, and in terms of the job we’re doing and the conditions in which we are doing it.

“We’re all being screwed here, so we should all fight together. I think that’s the way forward.”