Nurses To Begin Work To Rule, Summer of Discontent Awaits?

The Nursing organisations INO and PNA have stated that they are to escalate their work to rule in 10 days unless the government meet their demands over pay and hours. As far as I am aware the INO didn’t opt into this round of social partnership as they felt it didn’t suitably address their issues. On that front it is probably not surprising to see them being at the forefront of trade union activism in the run up to the election.

Under the work to rule, nurses and midwives from both unions will be banned from carrying out clerical, administrative and IT work.Nurses will not make or answer telephone calls except in essential circumstances.

They will not attend meetings with management at local and national level, except where an individual patient’s care is concerned.The INO and PNA say the work to rule will be carried out on a national and continuous basis and they will begin to roll out work stoppages, unless their claims are addressed.

The nurse’s headline demands are a 35 hour working week and an additional allowance for nurses living in the Dublin area. This dispute over hours has been at or near the heart of nursing disputes for years, however they clearly feel that now is a very good time to demand it again. There is of course another issue at play here and that is the cap on civil service recruiting which requires hospitals to use very expensive agency nurses to cover slots in the timetable versus hiring additional nurses. The feasiblity of the 35 hour week and its cost effectiveness is likely to be helped by a move on this issue aswell and is likely to go unresolved until the cap is addressed.

On the pay issue however, I wonder if the INO/PNA action merely sets the trend in motion for a summer of trade union actions over pay and conditions. We have noted already that inflation has begun to get ahead of the government and they don’t appear to have any coherent strategy for tackling it. The increase in inflation will pressurise wages of almost every worker in this country (especially those with mortgages to pay).

The living wage motion passed recently by Dublin City Council is an intersting policy initiative in light of these circumstances but one this government will balk at implementing. This leaves a wide open collision course for government and a trade union movement which is aready beginning to mutter about how Towards 2016 got inflation predictions wrong and may leave workers at a disadvantage.  In light of tightening budgets at home, workers are no doubt likely to strike or push for better wages, government likely to push back.

The outcome could well be a breakdown in industrial realtions on a realtively big scale (possibly provoked by causes external to the issue), right in time for the election. Of course one can never predict how the public will react. Should the union’s be perceived as having a just case, then perhaps the government parties will pay the price. The converse however can just as easily happen today with so many non-unionised workers in the society. FF backbenchers will no doubt continue to chew their nails at a rapid rate and worry that they were correct back in February.