More than 10,000 ambulance workers across England and Wales will strike days before Christmas if the Government declines to open pay talks, the first national ambulance walkout in 30 years.
Three unions revealed the dates members will walk out, coordinating industrial activity for Wednesday 21 December.
Members of the GMB union, who include paramedics, Emergency Care Assistants, call handlers and other attendants, will also walk out on Wednesday 28 December after a decade of below-inflation pay awards generated a staffing situation.
Not all union members at all ambulance trusts supported strike action, with some unions at some services failing to meet strict turnout thresholds set by the Tory government.
While GMB members met the threshold for walkouts at nine ambulance services, Unison members met the threshold at five services and Unite met the threshold at three.
At all but one of the regional services spanning England and Wales will see GMB strike action, apart from the East of England.
It’s part of a surge of strikes across health services, railways and the public sector after NHS staff were offered a pay rise worth as little as 4 per cent despite skyrocketing inflation.
The walkout will happen a day after Royal College of Nursing members stage their second walkout, also over pay, and RMT members are hurtling towards four days of action next week at train companies, plus a Network Rail strike from 6 pm Christmas Eve, after rejecting a 4 per cent a year pay rise offer.
RMT general secretary Mick Lynch admitted services would wind down more quickly than expected on Christmas Eve, and people would have to depart early for festive getaways.
Yet Rishi Sunak didn’t raise the walkouts at the Cabinet meeting, despite days left to prevent chaos on the railways in the run-up to Christmas.
Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner said the militant Tory Government was to blame, adding that when she spoke to the trade unions they were very clear they didn’t want to go on strike and that they wanted to settle the dispute.
On the railways, the government was still endeavouring to force minimum service levels, which would mean workers having to break walkouts, but Downing Street refused to confirm a timescale for a divisive move.
The Prime Minister’s spokesperson said that unions still had time to step back and prevent some of the misery the public face.
The Government and everybody in it gets a pay increase set every year and it’s always way exceeding inflation, but you never hear them say it’s too much, they always take it and top up their already sky-high salaries – in fact, I don’t even know what most of them do to earn it. So, good for the strikers, and believe me, non of them take delight in going on strike, but if they don’t make a stand now, they’ll be trodden all over for years to come, especially while we’re under this Conservative government, although I’m not sure that Labour would have backed down to the unions either.
Our government has systematically underfunded the NHS solely to sell it off to the highest bidder, and the rot from our government was established a long time ago and they’re just waiting to put a tin lid on it.
This will likely be the last chance to salvage what’s left of our NHS, and not only that, all front-line workers should be paid a top-notch salary because without them we would be pretty screwed, and I hope that they can accomplish what they want even if it is going to hurt a lot of us.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 