Unions privately voice misgivings over BMA pay demands and doctors’ strikes | Trade unions
Unions have privately expressed concern about the upcoming doctors’ strike, expressing disappointment with the conduct of talks and the British Medical Association’s demands.
The BMA is pressing for a higher pay rise than the 3.5% offered to doctors by the government, and a strike is planned for next week.
However, more than a million non-doctor NHS staff, including nurses, physiotherapists, midwives, paramedics, ambulance workers and hospital porters, are expected to receive an even lower pay rise of 3.3 per cent set through the Agenda for Change (AfC) system.
The BMA’s decision to push for more than 3.5 per cent has left some other unions with NHS staff aggrieved, particularly some unions whose wages are set through the AfC. “The deals we are able to offer our members are becoming much more difficult to sell,” said a senior union official.
Another said they believed the fact that the union was run by junior doctors rather than professional negotiators meant negotiations were being conducted in a chaotic manner. “I think any pragmatic approach has been abandoned.”
The first union source said they felt that having junior doctors lead negotiations made people less willing to agree on pay and conditions that would affect them entering the workforce. “Sometimes you have to step away and I don’t think they see the big picture.”
A third senior union source said there was “undoubted resentment” among unions representing non-doctor NHS staff and a perception that the government “always seems more willing to listen to doctors”, but added that the BMA was doing its job for its members by pushing for the best deal possible.
Another union, GMB, is in conflict with the BMA over the salary offer made by the BMA to its own staff.
Staff at the BMA union will go on strike to coincide with junior doctors’ six-day strike on 7 April. The BMA’s latest 2.75 per cent salary offer to its staff is lower than the latest advice for junior doctors of 3.5 per cent.
A BMA spokesman said: “The BMA is the union for doctors and medical students. Doctors have seen their pay fall by more than a fifth since 2008-09 and we have been very clear in recent years that our aim is to see this restored. So this year’s 3.5% award will never be acceptable because no progress will be made to reverse these real-term pay cuts. We are taking industrial action to get better for doctors. We cannot speak for others about unions’ strategies or inadequate government for their members.” why they think it is their role to justify being given the salary.
“In negotiations with the government, the BMA is represented by selected resident doctor leaders alongside the BMA’s specialist BMA staff, bringing together invaluable on-the-ground insights from working doctors and professional negotiation experts.
“Doctors are in a very different position to our staff. Since 2008 they have suffered much larger cuts to their pay in real terms and a deterioration in their general working conditions. While the UK is losing doctors because their pay is too low, at the BMA we have extremely competitive pay and benefits, extremely good staff retention and very low turnover rates.”
NHS staff covered by the AfC deal have not yet begun talks about the wider structure of their pay, and their unions are also likely to push for reform of their pay scales. A recent Unison analysis of three years of NHS data for England shows no significant improvement, and in some cases a decline, in pay satisfaction levels for AfC contract workers.
Medical and dental staff were the only group where pay satisfaction levels increased to some extent, with an increase of 18 percentage points since 2023. Unison said these findings showed how many NHS workers continue to feel undervalued and that nothing has changed under the new government.
