Whatever the merits of a trade union’s claim for better pay or conditions, industrial disputes are political events. And as nurses staging a historic walkout on Thursday discovered, public opinion matters.
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) went into the strike with strong backing, but the momentum of public opinion may now be heading in the wrong direction as they head towards a second strike day next Tuesday.
In October, the RCN commissioned its own survey by YouGov, which found 65% of the public supported nursing staff taking strike action. The signs were that the people accepted the nurses’ arguments that they were striking more for the sake of the NHS’s ability to deliver care than their own finances. Only half of people polled were confident in the quality of care available to them on the NHS, and the majority (79%) said there weren’t enough nursing staff in the NHS to deliver safe patient care.
Then, when the strikes were first announced in November, 59% supported the action, Ipsos polling found. Again, in late November 74% of British adults felt it was acceptable for nurses to strike for better patient care, while 71% said it was acceptable for them to take industrial action for a pay rise.
But then the reality of nurses walking off wards and talk of “Christmas Day” levels of staffing seemed to kick in. As nurses joined hospital picket lines on Thursday new polling showed that support had fallen. Now only half of people support the strikes (50%) and the proportion of those opposing strikes has risen from 24% last month to 34% now.
These were the views of a representative sample of over 1,000 people asked on Tuesday and Wednesday this week – when talk turned to the potential risks to patient safety.
For context, levels of public support for the striking nurses remain higher than for the striking rail workers which are at about 30%. And the RCN general secretary, Pat Cullen, does not appear likely to become a villain in the eyes of opponents in the mould of her RMT equivalent, Mick Lynch.
That may in part be down to the mixed feelings nurses have expressed about walking out. Cullen said on Thursday she woke up feeling “heartbroken” and said it was “tragic that I have to lead the profession on to the picket lines to have their voice heard”.
But the slide in support is likely to leave ministers feeling partly vindicated at their decision to face down the nurses and not engage in negotiations over their demand for a pay rise of inflation plus 5% – in effect, a 17% rise.
Thursday’s poll showed 49% of the public thought this demand was too high, 37% considered it about right and 7% deemed it too low. In addition 80% of the public is concerned about the ability of the NHS to provide safe care for patients during the strikes.
Nursing leaders have insisted they will not put people at risk and they staffed chemotherapy, emergency cancer services, dialysis, critical care units, neonatal and paediatric intensive care, alongside several other services. But that does not appear to be an argument that has been widely accepted and the health minister Maria Caulfield said about 70,000 appointments, procedures and surgeries would be lost in England because of the strike.
To prevent support sliding further nurses look likely to counter that point by saying without better pay people will be at even greater risk – or as one placard outside St Thomas’ hospital in Westminster read: “Staff shortages cost lives.” As Chelsea Barratt, a 22-year old nurse on a picket line, said: “All the media are saying we want extra money, obviously we do in a sense, but it’s not even that, it’s about people’s families, they are not safe.” There are 17,000 nursing posts unfilled on any given day, according to the Nuffield Trust.
Public opinion on strikes has always mattered. As one magazine columnist put it: “The voice of the people and the tone of the press are the arbiters in nearly every labour conflict nowadays.” That was not a reflection on the current wave of industrial strife but was written during the 1891 Manningham Mills pay strike by thousands of Bradford textile workers which lasted 19 weeks. It was an unprecedented display of militancy by mostly female workers, as this week’s walkout by nurses has been.
The Manningham strikes failed. The nurses may have to breathe new life into the extensive public support they still retain to make sure they do not follow in those footsteps.
