Whatever the grounds of union claims for better pay or conditions, labor disputes are political events. And as the nurses organizing Thursday’s historic walkout discovered, public opinion matters.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) went into the strike with strong support, but the momentum of public opinion may now be heading in the wrong direction as they head into a second strike day next Tuesday.
In October, the RCN commissioned its own survey from YouGov, which found that 65% of community supported nursing staff were taking strike action. The signs were that people were accepting the nurses’ arguments that they were striking more over the NHS’s ability to deliver care than their own finances. Just half of people surveyed are confident in the quality of care available to them in the NHS, and the majority (79%) say there are not enough nurses in the NHS to provide safe patient care.
Then, when the strikes were first announced in November, 59% supported the action, an Ipsos poll found. Again at the end of November, 74% of British adults thought it was acceptable for nurses to strike for better patient care, while 71% said it was acceptable for them to take strike action to raise pay.
But then the reality of nurses leaving wards and talk of ‘Christmas’ staffing levels seems to have set in. As nurses joined hospital pickets on Thursday, new polls showed that support had fallen. Only half of people now support strikes (50%) and the proportion of those who oppose strikes has risen from 24% last month to 34% now.
Those were the views of a representative sample of more than 1,000 people asked on Tuesday and Wednesday this week – when the conversation turned to potential risks to patient safety.
For context, levels of public support for striking nurses remain higher than for striking railway workers, which are around 30%. And the RCN general secretary, Pat Cullen, does not seem likely to become a villain in the eyes of opponents in the mold of her RMT equivalent, Mick Lynch.
This may in part be due to the mixed feelings nurses expressed about leaving. Cullen said Thursday she woke up “with a broken heart” and said it was “tragic that I have to lead the profession on the pickets to hear their voice.”
But the drop in support is likely to leave ministers feeling partly vindicated in their decision to stand up to nurses and not take part in negotiations over their demand for a pay rise due to inflation plus 5% – effectively a 17% increase.
Thursday’s poll showed 49% of the public thought that demand was too high, 37% thought it was about right and 7% thought it was too low. In addition, 80% of the public are concerned about the NHS’s ability to provide safe patient care during strikes.
Nursing leaders insisted they would not put people at risk and recruited staff for chemotherapy, cancer emergency services, dialysis, intensive care units, neonatal and pediatric intensive care, along with several other services. But that does not appear to be an argument that has been widely accepted and Health Secretary Maria Caulfield said around 70,000 appointments, procedures and operations would be lost in England because of the strike.
To prevent cuts to support, nurses look likely to counter this claim by saying that without better pay people will be put at even greater risk – or so says one poster outside St Thomas’ Hospital in Westminster : “Staff shortages cost lives.” As Chelsea Barratt, a 22-year-old picket nurse, said: “All the media is saying we want extra money, obviously we do in a way, but it’s not even that, it’s about people’s families, they’re not safe.” There are 17,000 unfilled nursing jobs every day, according to the Nuffield Trust.
Public opinion about strikes has always mattered. As one magazine columnist said, “The voice of the people and the tone of the press are the arbiters of almost every labor dispute today.” This was not a reflection of the current wave of industrial strife, but was written during the Manningham Mills wage strike of 1891 year by thousands of textile workers in Bradford, which lasted 19 weeks. It was an unprecedented act of militancy by mostly female workers, as was the nurses’ walkout this week.
Manningham’s shots failed. Nurses may need to reinvigorate the broad public support they still have to ensure they do not follow these steps.
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