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Nurses receive activist training to mobilise for strike action

Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Up to 25,000 nurses are training to become activists to help Britain’s nursing union force Boris Johnson to improve his “pitiful” 1% NHS pay offer.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) hopes the move will help it achieve a turnout of 50% in the strike ballot it has pledged to call if ministers continue to resist calls for a bigger increase.

It has enlisted a renowned expert in healthcare campaigning to teach 25,000 frontline NHS nurses how to become effective advocates. Jane McAlevey has helped nurses in the United States to unionise and win better terms and conditions for 25 years.

Dave Dawes, chair of the RCN’s ruling council, said the nurses would become an “army of activists” that would help rouse its 475,000-strong membership to vote in a ballot, and undertake local campaigns to win public support.

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Watch: People in London give their thoughts on NHS pay

The RCN has brought in McAlevey for what could be a bruising and drawn-out fight with the government over the 1% pay deal it offered to NHS workers in England. Opposition parties, health unions and NHS bosses have all criticised the tiny increase as too low, especially after health workers earned widespread admiration for their work during the Covid pandemic.

Dawes said: “If we are going to be balloting for industrial action later this year, which looks increasingly likely, this training will make a huge difference in what the turnout of the ballot will be.

“If it’s up to the members whether or not we take industrial action, actually if you don’t get 50% of the members to vote, it’s dead in the water under trade union law.

“No nurse wants to do industrial action. But if you’re going to do it and successfully, you need to have the majority of the workforce on your side and you need to have the majority of the public understanding what this is about.”

The RCN is pressing for a 12.5% pay rise for all nurses. Health unions are due to decide by Wednesday whether to accept the Scottish government’s offer of a 4% rise for all health workers in Scotland.

McAlevey’s six-week course will help nurses channel the “anger and frustration” they feel at the 1% offer into a mass mobilisation of nurses and help them shift Johnson’s stance, Dawes added.

The RCN is soliciting recruits by telling them “don’t get angry – get organised”. The skills and knowledge they will gain will help them “engage, educate and empower members to be a force for change in their workplaces and communities”. The first training session took place last week.

McAlevey, a senior policy fellow at the University of California’s centre for labour research and education, said the course will identify nurses who are “natural or organic leaders” despite not being part of the RCN’s existing network of workplace representatives. They will be nurses who are liked and admired by their peers and demonstrate an ability to “move their colleagues” through persuasion and action, she added.

Her experience helping nurses in the US and elsewhere is that the nurses who will emerge through the training as effective organisers will not already be involved in union activity. “These workers are almost always overlooked because they tend to not be pro-union activists,” she said.

As an example of what workplace mobilisation could achieve, Dawes cited the success of strike action by RCN members in Northern Ireland in late 2019 and early 2020, which persuaded the Stormont government to act on concerns they raised about unsafe staffing levels in hospitals and unequal pay. The walkouts, which enjoyed popular support, was the first time the RCN had taken strike action since it was founded in 1916.

Watch: Boris Johnson faces grilling on NHS pay rise at PMQs

• Join a Guardian Live discussion about how the NHS has performed during the pandemic, amid government plans for another reorganisation. With Denis Campbell, Dr Rachel Clarke and Sir David Nicholson on Wednesday 12 May, 7pm BST | 8pm CEST | 11am PDT | 2pm EDT. Book tickets here