The United Kingdom faces new strikes on Thursday, affecting both hospitals, where thousands of specialist doctors have stopped working for the first time in ten years, and the railways, where train drivers have once again walked off the job.
The country, faced with a serious crisis in the cost of living, has been affected for months by strikes in various sectors: health, transport, education or the post office… Employees are demanding wage increases in the face of inflation which is slowing down but which remains the highest in the G7 countries, at 7.9% in June over one year.
After the nurses, the paramedics, the “junior doctors” who are the equivalent of interns, it is the turn this week of the “consultants”, the most experienced doctors, to stop work in English hospitals. They began a 48-hour strike at 7 a.m. local time (6 a.m. GMT) on Thursday.
Hospital dentists have joined the movement.
The public health service, the NHS, is stretched thin. After years of austerity treatment and the Covid-19 pandemic, access to care is increasingly complicated.
According to a BBC investigation published on Wednesday, children have to wait up to 18 months for dental treatments requiring anesthesia, including tooth extractions.
The five-day strike, until last Tuesday, of the “junior doctors” led to the postponement of more than 100,000 appointments. That of specialists could cause even more disruption, the NHS has warned.
In eight months of strikes, more than 600,000 medical appointments have been affected in total, according to NHS Chief Medical Officer Stephen Powis. “It becomes more and more difficult to get services back on track after each strike,” he lamented.
“No strike is a party. It’s a sad day,” said from a picket outside a London hospital Philip Kelly, specializing in acute medicine. But “at the end of the year, we will be paid 40% less than in 2008, in real terms”, he lamented.
The government has proposed a 6% increase for this year for medical specialists.
“My door is always open to discuss non-wage issues, but this proposal is final and I therefore call on the BMA (the British Medical Association union) to end its strikes immediately,” Health Minister Steve Barclay said in a statement.
“We are very committed (in our work), we are highly qualified, we do extremely important work (…) Of course it’s a vocation but we have to pay the bills, our housing, and we have to educate our children”, insists Rosy Jalan, radiologist, questioned by AFP in front of the BMA headquarters.
But Christopher Leak, ophthalmologist, also evokes more broadly “the deterioration of working conditions”.
“It’s not just about wages, it’s more generally because we’re being asked to work a lot harder,” he adds.
On July 13, Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak urged civil service unions to end strikes and accept the government’s ultimate pay raise offer of 5% to 7% depending on the sector. The teachers thus announced the suspension of their movement after an offer of 6.5%.
Train drivers from the RMT union, who have stepped up strikes for a year, also walk out on Thursday, as the school holidays start.
Rail services warned that on Thursday, then July 22 and 29, there would be “little or no service across much of the network”. The railway union Aslef went on strike on July 17, which should end on Saturday.
“These strikes are part of a campaign that began more than a year ago,” said Mick Lynch, general secretary of the RMT, on Sky News. They are disrupting trains “from the South West of England to Scotland”, he noted.
“We are really in trouble. We need people to have decent salaries,” he added.
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20/07/2023 20:38:29 – London (AFP) – © 2023 AFP