Kinnair said that if the review body accepted the department’s advice, “a pay award as poor as this would amount to only an extra £3.50 per week take-home pay for an experienced nurse. Nobody would think that is fair in the middle of a pandemic. Nursing staff would feel they are being punished and made to pay for the cost of the pandemic. Nursing deserves a 12.5% increase.”
We’re trying to recover from the worst recession in 300 years and nurses should get a 12.5% pay rise?
Fuck off matey
Perhaps discontented nurses should switch careers: to travel agent perhaps?
The nurses still have jobs. They should be profoundly grateful.
Actually, given that the majority of covid transmission was via hospitals, now would be a good time for them to stay out of the public’s eye…
@Tim the Coder
It shows the serious disconnect when people are just hoping to hold onto their jobs and hope for businesses to just survive at this time, yet nurses should get a pay bump. My job is tied to the hospitality industry and I am waiting for its death to reach its end while trying to generate income for the business other ways (whichever comes first).
Well if you’re going to ask ask big, classic high ball. I’m actually kind of interested in what effects 12.5 would actually give in the market place for nurses. More or less hours worked? More or less experienced nurses working them? Please try to sell it to us that way for once.
OK, make it £3.60 extra per week, and legislation forcing us to do that clappy evening thing once the clocks go forward.
The public sector will, of course, always hark back to pay rises over the ‘last decade’ conveniently forgetting all the troughing that occurred in the decade before that. And ignore the cost of pensions – I’m sure I read somewhere that to get the same sort of pension in the private sector, an employer would need to be paying 35% of salary into a pension pot. I’m sure there are people more knowledgeable than me on that point who can correct me.
But given that a career in the public sector can give you a 50%-66% ‘career average earnings’ indexed-linked pension for 20-30 years in retirement, it would be interesting to compare how much in a pension pot some poor sod in the private sector would need to achieve the same.
To clarify my closing comment:
I have been receiving NHS hospital attention during this period, and I have found it excellent: well organised, helpful, and a radical improvement upon pre-covid experiences.
If there is any stressed out, overworked, crisis-level plague ward events going on, theye are well removed from any part of the hospitals visited. Indded, the puntuality of appointments and helpfulness of staff tell the exact opposite story: boredom and glad for the activity.
Astonishingly, there was little difference between NHS and private!
So I am not criticising nurses in general, or specifically.
However, when the official inquiries into how the pandemic was handled are held, I think the medical profession in general will show poorly overall, with some exceptions.
The suppression of hydroxychloroquine/zinc and Vitamin-D will tarnish the profession for generations: both as treatment & prophylactic, medicines of long standing, safe, cheap, and in plentiful supply.
Given the minimal downside, and widespread evidence of benefit, one can only assume the objections were political.
This is going to take a lot of explaining.
Why is an anti-viral drug with a 50 year treatment history suddenly too dangerous to use?
Sure, the benefits haven’t been proven by long-winded mass testing. But that hasn’t stopped the vaccine usage, has it?
@Andrew C
The pension situation is even worse.
The way the “Lifetime Allowance” is calculated means that Defined Benefit schemes, like the public sector, now have a 3:1 advantage over Defined Contribuion schemes, now all that is left in the private sector.
I forget the exact figures, but I think the punitive tax sets in at around a £20-25k/annum DC pension scheme, but £70-80k/annum DB.
So not only must the private sector worker pay far more into the pension, they have to pay in even more to cope with the 60% punitive tax for any pension above this LTA.
Getting the ‘hidden’ pension element abolished and included in headline salaries is long overdue.
Hang on. All nurses get an annual increment of about 1.6% in addition to the 1% pay rise. The increment is an automatic increase in pay grade within a band. The pay rise is the increase in pay at each band, so nurses are getting a 2.6% increase on average.
Can we distinguish the nurses who put in the shifts in the ICUs, and those who made silly videos in the empty wards?
I’m sure the unions wouldn’t let us.
On medical advice we have shrunk the economy by 10%. On average then everyone should be taking a 10% pay cut. The nurses should be delighted that they are not being asked to.
“to get the same sort of pension in the private sector, an employer would need to be paying 35% of salary into a pension pot. I’m sure there are people more knowledgeable than me on that point who can correct me.”
Here are the numbers for the universities’ scheme as reported in The Times.
“USS … is expected to say that the total pension contribution of employers and employees would need to rise from the current 30.7 per cent of payroll to 49.6 per cent. A rise to 34.7 per cent due later this year has already been agreed.”
In other words for a private scheme (which USS is) 35% sounds about right if “USS’s middle scenario” pans out. I hate to think what their bad scenario is.
Any official enquiry won’t show shit. It will be a carefully choreographed mutual backslapping session praising “our” nhs and absolving politicians and their advisors of any mistakes. Lessons will be learned, of course. If anyone steps sufficiently out of line in the next couple of years, they will probably be made Official Scapegoat.
We’ll have to wait for private sector enquiries to pick away at FOI requests to build up the real picture of what actually happened.
Given the minimal downside, and widespread evidence of benefit, one can only assume the objections were political.
Of course they were. It was The Donald that suggested giving hydroxychloroquine a go and was derided for doing so. The WHO and every other halfwit with TDS did their level best to discredit the notion to the extent that the FDA wouldn’t countenance the idea even though the drug is already a proven anti-viral.
If he had said the opposite, things may have been different.
Tim
It is pretty obvious the opposition to HCQ/Zinc/Vit D was political. Once the US establishment decided to use it to deride Trump the rest of the world fell into line.
Any country that benefitted by using this completely safe procedure would have destroyed the “Orange Man mad as well as bad” narrative.
Sorry – Henry beat me to it!
And who ‘pays’ nurses. The profits of private business. Do nurses pay tax? No. You cannot be both paid by the taxpayer and pay tax.
Oh, I’m all for actual nurses getting 12.5%…
As long as they cut the managers ( and various involved busybodies while we’re at it ) 12.5%.
Given the manager/nurse ratio in modern hospitals, there’s a good chance you’d actually save money that way..
I’d be in favour of a 12 1/2% rise for the nurses. Providing the same is given to the supermarket workers, delivery drivers, plumbers, electricians, guys who ran the sewerage systems & water supplies, taxi drivers …
I’m happy to accept that some doctors, nurses, ancillary workers and other support staff will have been working beyond what is reasonably expected for extended periods.
The way to reward them is to give them a one off bonus, as would happen in the private sector, not give everyone a 12.5% pay rise in perpetuity.
No-one seems willing to point out that the pay rise is because nurses had to deal with people with a disease. But that’s exactly what nurses do. Deal with the sick at a time of crisis.
They’re like those soldiers who join the army in peacetime and then refuse to fight.
Those asking for the rise should be shot for shirking. OK, sacked.
What is the point of nurses who don’t like having to deal with sick people?
Didn’t the 1.5 million NHS employees cause 40% of infections anyway. Paycyt time no?
@ Andrew C
Last time I looked at the *new money-saving* version of the LGPS I calculated that *if the yield on index-linked gilts rose to zero from -1%* that the cost of the pension of a middle-aged female employee (and most NHS and LG employees are female) was 45% of salary. Bit less for men with a lower life expectancy but male nurses are a very small %age of the total. The employee contribution to the pension scheme is less than 10%.
So 35% is an understatement but not a stupid one.