A little thought

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So, the government are attempting to freeze nurse’s (and other healthcare workers) pay increments. On top of a pay freeze.

So, for those of you who don’t know about this, here’s a brief summary, as I understand it (which is at a pretty basic level, anyhow). Nurses (and lots of other healthcare workers) are paid a crap low wage; this is because it’s traditionally a women’s job, and women’s jobs are traditionally paid badly. If you think Nurses pay isn’t that bad, try working 3 out of 4 weekends, nights, and other shifts in such a way as to very rarely see your friends or partner, then see how much you think your life (because I have no life outside work) is worth.

I know my pay sucks because I come from the private sector where I worked about 1/4 as hard and got paid the same amount. In fact, I would be on about 2.5-3 times my current salary by now had I carried on, and I’d be working a nice 9-5 job, Monday to Friday. I’d hate my job, but I’d be paid well. Now I love (well, some of the time) my job, but I’m paid lousily.

Anyhow, to sweeten the pill a bit, each year we get an increment, until we reach a ‘gateway’. This is in return for doing lots of skill development in our copious free time. This is reflecting on our work, studying to learn extra skills, all sorts of bits and pieces to develop our portfolios. Then we reach a ‘gateway’ at which point we’re expected to produce evidence that we’ve met a specific list of skills and developed our communication skills, etc, to such a level as warrant more pay. When we get to a Gateway we present the evidence and get a bit more pay, if we’ve not got the evidence you stop getting increments.

The Government have decided that since Nurses trashed the economy, we should help fix it by having our pay frozen. Given that inflation is at about 3%, so that’s a handy pay-cut each year. Thanks for that. Now they’re trying to persuade us to accept that the agreement that our pay goes up with increasing skills should disappear. They want to fix us at a roughly 5% pay decrease for the next 2 years.

Mmm, that sounds fair. Yeah.

Of course, this is unlikely to affect morale* in an already demoralised workforce.

I’m also really glad that they let Vodafone off 6 BILLION in taxes, and are happy that those lovely bankers who have helped so many people in the UK are getting lovely bonuses. Not pissed off at all. Oh no.

* “So why bother with my portfolio then? There’s no point if I don’t get anything for it”. “Why do we do this job? Because we’re idiots”. Two nice little quotes from yesterday.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.