The fire last time: COHSE and NHS pay in 1974

As Leo Colston said, the past is a foreign country. But in these days of cheap international air travel, that shouldn't stop us visiting.  There's been a blogroll link for some time on 4glengate.net to the blog of Michael Walker, a former COHSE activist, which contains an archive of documents and reflections on the history and achievements of COHSE - the Confederation Of Health Service Employees. It's an impressive archive, and every health worker, every UNISON member, should spend some time reading up on it.

This morning, I've been thinking about the UNISON consultative ballot on the below-inflation-for-three-years NHS pay offer which is due to start this week. When we discussed the pay offer at UNISON health conference last month, and subsequently, according to reports from colleagues around the country, officers of UNISON and those lay members who want us to accept the offer have been at pains to stress that rejecting the offer would necessarily imply taking industrial action. Not just industrial action but sustained industrial action. I think that word is included just to pour scorn on those public sector workers who have already held a one day strike in support of their campaign for better pay, but scorn in such a situation is the chocolate pot calling the kettle black. At least, as many of my colleagues in Leicester keep telling me, the teachers are doing something. 

Clearly some people think that threatening health workers with having to take industrial action will lead to them giving up on the idea that their pay should keep rate with rising prices. It certainly works with the leaders of the Royal College of Nursing. But there's no reason it should work on the rest of us.

What the COHSE archive blog shows is that a union which prepares well...

In February 1974, COHSE, as the main NHS union, ran a recruiting campaign for nurses. Albert Spanswick, by this time General Secretary-Elect, argued in the union journal: 'unions have a reputation of getting things done' and that 'COHSE is determined to fight'. He was also able to report that the balance between psychiatric and general nurse members in COHSE was evening out.

The recruitment returns for this period showed a marked increase and were about 73 per cent up on the previous month, at 6,087 compared with 3,509.

...  and knows what to ask for...

16 May 1974: COHSE's NEC meets in emergency session and decides that industrial action will be imposed if the meeting at 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister on 20 May does not provide 'cash on the table'. RCN argues for mass resignations of nurses from the NHS. 

... and what to do... 

20 May 1974: meeting at 10 Downing Street yields a promise only of urgent consideration of the problem and an assurance of the Government's concern.

21 May 1974: emergency meeting of all COHSE regional officers held. Six-point plan of industrial action announced to come into effect at midnight on 26—27 May, as follows: (a) a ban on clerical duties; (b) a ban on domestic duties; (c) a ban on 'acting-up'; (d) a ban on all overtime; (e) selected and short withdrawals of labour; (f) ASC staff asked not to fill-in with domestic jobs normally done by nurses.

... and has some rank and file leadership from below... 

8 May 1974: eleven nurses at Storthes Hall Hospital, Huddersfield, strike for one hour— three wards closed. For the first time, nurses have taken industrial action — 'The possibility', said the Guardian of 13 May 'of strikes by nurses is real for the first time.'

... can win something meaningful, as well as increased pay:

July 1974: at the end of July, Mrs Castle [the Labour Minister of Health, Barbara Castle] tells a special meeting of COHSE's NEC that the report will be published in the week beginning 16 September. NEC agrees not to reimpose industrial action — Albert Spanswick says that COHSE's action has been instrumental in getting the inquiry and that the industrial action had, by expressing the determination of nurses, achieved the establishment of a clear date for the Committee's deliberations. Industrial action had been regrettable, but 'had given nurses their self-respect'.

Most of the above excerpts taken from the 1974 Campaign Diary. 

As the blog notes, the campaign in 1974 led to "the best pay rises ever" for NHS staff. Note again that while COHSE was planning strike action unless there was "cash on the table" the RCN advocated that nurses should quit their jobs. How that was ever supposed to win a pay rise I cannot understand. 

Oh, and there's a great picture too. 

In 1982, when nurses' pay had again fallen behind inflation, COHSE had an 'action plan': 

The Action Committee set up by COHSE's National Executive Committee met on 13 April 1982 and drew up a comprehensive range of recommendations for industrial action to be taken up by branches.

The two main forms to be applied within the COHSE guidelines on the protection of patient care and maintenance of emergency services are:

•ban on all non-emergency admissions;

• selective two hour withdrawals of Labour. 

A further list was also set out, again within COHSE's Code of Conduct and within the 1979 Joint Agreement on Emergency Services. The proposals, as well as the emergency services agreement, are listed in Head Office Circular 235/82. Designed to cause the greatest administrative inconvenience to management and least harm to patients, they include:

• ban on private patients' services;

• non co-operation with private contractors;

•refusal by nurses to carry out non-nursing duties, as well as by non-nurses to carry out nursing duties;

•ban on the cleaning of non-clinical areas;

•reduction of output of hospital laundries;

•holding of local demonstrations.

It's not rocket science, and it's very similar to the successful tactics more recently employed by the Irish Nurses' Organisation and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association in Ireland to win a significant pay victory. But where, in all the discussions around the 2008 pay offer, is any suggestion that UNISON should draw up an 'action plan' of any kind? 

It's a cliche now, and therefore unchallenged, that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But health workers currently face a much worse fate that repeating the experience of either 1974 or 1982. Learning from history right now might enable us to recapture some of the fire, some of the fight, and some of the determination that COHSE members showed to win significant pay rises in both of those campaigns.

For the last word plucked from the COHSE archive for today, I will turn to Arthur Moyle, NUPE leader and later a Labour MP (see, Karen, some things don't change), who wrote in the NUPE Journal in October 1937:

Nurses, however, must realise that improvements in their conditions of service will come only when they have the good sense to organise, just as other professions have done, through their appropriate trade unions. To do so is neither unprofessional nor revolutionary. It is, in fact, essential to good administration.