Resident Doctors in England streiken wegen Gehaltsrestaurierung

If you aren’t in a low paid job then wages have collapsed since 2008. It will be interesting to see if this idea of „pay restoration“ catches on.

Good move from Wes & Keir to piss-off highly skilled, highly mobile, highly educated young professionals. Another thing our country is definitely doing right. We are a resurgent Great Britain.

Good. A well paid medical workforce benefits patients.

Cost of settling the Doctors strikes: £2 billion. Unaffordable. Politically impossible.

Cost of maintaining the pension triple-lock next year: An extra £5 billion. Perfectly affordable. Politically savvy.

Pay the Doctors.

Just a reminder that the government found £11.7 billion for the overseas climate budget, £3.4 billion to give away the Chagos Islands and are currently spending £8 million a day on migrant hotels for undocumented adult males who have travelled from France.

The money is there, it’s just about priorities. Choices have to be made, I’d rather my taxes be spent on Doctors.

What the doctors are demanding would cost the public roughly 1 billion pounds (slightly opaque, so if anyone has a more accurate number, please let me know). A penny on income tax raises 6.9 billion pounds, so this pay rise could be achieved with 0.142p added to the basic rate. This would cost the median earner about 3 pounds per month.

Does this really sound like an amount of money worth getting into a protracted battle with the doctors over? Frankly, I would be happy to forgo a cup of coffee per month to end this, especially if a compromise deal was made and I only lost out on an espresso.

We are already facing a crisis with enormous waiting lists and a sick population. Pushing more of our best and brightest overseas or into the private sector, while we very slowly train replacements and cover strike actions with senior or agency staff, will cost us more in the long term.

Fully support these.

How can you think it’s okay for doctors to be paid less today than they were in 2008? People wonder why they’re leaving but they get abuse when they try to get better conditions

I’m not particularly happy with doctors striking but if the government can find the money to restore winter fuel payments to a bunch of greedy pensioners who don’t need it then they can afford to pay public sector workers better. Labour should accept they are not getting reelected and start making the best choices for the country rather than worrying about trying to please the voter base (old people).

I agree they should be paid more but isn’t this punching down rather than up? Rich people will have private health care anyway. Only the working classes will suffer as a result.

They just accepted a new pay deal in September after striking. If they weren’t happy with it they shouldn’t have accepted. It’s the fact that they are striking less than a year after agreeing a new pay deal that’s going to upset most people – and yes, in a family with 3 NHS doctors.

https://www.bma.org.uk/our-campaigns/resident-doctor-campaigns/pay-in-england/2024-pay-deal-for-resident-doctors-working-in-england#:~:text=A%20referendum%20was%20held%20between,deal%2C%20ending%20our%20pay%20dispute.

Edit: and yes I’m aware the article continues to talk about taking the deal with aim for further pay dispute — but I don’t think vast majority of public will be onboard with that strategy.

In the words of the Royal Commission on Doctors’
and Dentists’ Remuneration, by the Macmillan government in 1960

>Doctors and dentists in the public service should not be used as a regulator of the national economy. Their earnings should not be prevented from rising because of a fear that others might follow

https://www.bma.org.uk/media/7612/report-into-the-failings-of-the-pay-review-process-for-doctors-and-dentists-sept23.pdf

I can’t believe how greedy these doctors are.

These greedy exploitative doctors who saw their pay erode over for more than a decade, who accepted this for the greater good due to “austerity”, should be grateful they received their claps, which the public gave them in abundance!!! Who cares if the real terms pay rise of 5-8% in 2024 and 5.4% this year was no where near the quoted 22-29% due to inflation? Inflation is just a figment of our imagination anyway!!

Do they think because they put their lives on the line during the pandemic, bore the heavy toll of losing patients and colleagues, self isolated away from their families to protect them, and worked on even more intense rotas they deserve to have their pay resorted?? Pfft.

The pandemic is over, it doesn’t matter that the workload catching up on health issues after the pandemic has tripled in size. They just need to get on with it. After all they now have well rested assistants to help them who are paid more than them to help them on weekdays only.

These doctors know what they signed up to when they enrolled on a 5-6 year medical course and racked up thousands in debt. Any intelligent 6 form student should know better than choose to work for an employer who does not value them. They made their bed and need to lie it in.