This article will be circulated in Vital Signs Mag no.4, of which we distribute 1,000 copies within our two local hospitals. Feel free to help us with the print cost.

Yesterday a colleague had his last day at work as a theatre assistant. He says he will now only do pizza delivery. I can here the voices in the background: “You see, it has come that far that we pay people who prepare and run surgery theatres the same or less than pizza delivery guys. We deserve more.” This attitude is part of the problem, it is one of the reasons why we don’t earn more as health workers. It assumes that wages are paid according to moral considerations. Wage levels are first and foremost an expression of the power balance between employers and workers. Our problem is that we don’t use our position as a huge mass of workers in our favour – there are over 18,000 of us employed at the BRI and Southmead. At least objectively our social power is far greater than those of food couriers…

Council tax has gone up, visa fees have gone up, rents have gone up, but what about our wages? As it stands, we are waiting for the government to tell us how much our pay increase will be. After that we will be waiting to see what the unions’ reaction will be. We say that sitting around and waiting to see what other people will do won’t get us anywhere. If we expect other people, sitting in cosy boardrooms, to fight our battles for us, we’ve already lost.

Working decades for the NHS and slipping below the minimum wage… fuck that!

It is a disgrace that we, who have worked as cleaners, house keepers, porters, admins, health care assistants for decades, would have slipped below the minimum wage in April 2025 if the government hadn’t thrown some pennies at our feet! This is not just a question of material survival, but also of our collective pride.

And while we wait for a national pay increase, management and bureaucrats are cutting our wages from below our feet on a local level already. At Southmead and the BRI, they abolished the 50% “allocation on arrival” bonus for bank shifts.. If you do work on the bank, you will now be paid at the lowest pay point of your band, instead of how it used to be where you would be paid at your usual rate. We haven’t seen much push back against this in Bristol, but at least we can see some examples of resistance. Nurses in Birmingham and Manchester stopped waiting and moaning and started a mass boycott of bank shifts. This sort of collective action shows management that they can’t get away with picking our pockets without a response. We need to learn these lessons of how to respond to these attacks together.

There is money, it’s just in the wrong pockets!

The Labour government says that there is no money, but the wealth of British billionaires increased by £35 million a day in 2024. Under the banner of “fiscal responsibility”, the Labour government has cut disability benefits and at the same time they decide to spend an extra £15 billion a year on the military. Their priorities are clear.  There is money around, but who gets it is a question of power.

We can’t rely on the trade unions!

We can all see that if there is no pressure, the government will think that they can get away with murder. They will throw a miserable pittance at us, and tell us we should be grateful for getting anything at all. They will say that times are tough and that we need to tighten our belts. For them, if we can’t pay our rent, or afford nursery for the kids without giving up even the little things that let us enjoy life, that’s just how it is. The only thing that they are scared of is us coming together as workers and putting up a fight. We know that we have to do this collectively, or they will break us apart and rely on already existing divisions to make our struggle weaker.

There are eight different unions at our hospital, but they never managed to come together and organise a proper struggle for pay. Last time, when the ambulance workers went on strike, UNITE and GMB organised strike days separately from each other. UNISON in Scotland accepted a fairly bad pay deal, while UNISON in England was still in dispute. The RCN says that they want pay deals that are separate from the rest of the workers in the NHS, selling out porters, cleaners and other health workers. 

We have to push for general assemblies and actions beyond the hospital!

How we struggle for better pay can’t be left to a few trade union officials behind closed doors. We need assemblies open to all workers across all jobs and bands from both hospitals where we can discuss and decide on how we can fight most effectively for better pay. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, though. There are dozens of examples of hospital workers organising their own struggles from the past and across the world. Just like our fellow health workers in Manchester, we can organise boycotts of bank shifts until they are paid properly. When management bring agency staff in to plug holes that management created, we can boycott these shifts. In other places like Germany, we have seen rotating strikes across departments in hospitals where workers decide on the picket line what work is necessary for patient safety whilst still putting pressure on management. We don’t even have to stop at the doors of the hospital. Health workers in Argentina blockaded ports where oil was being shipped to apply economic pressure. We could blockade private hospitals or Amazon warehouses in Bristol to do the same here. There are a thousand possibilities, and all of them will take work and organising, but we have to start the process now.

It isn’t just us in hospitals that are facing declining wages. In this moment of crisis, we can see the screws being tightened on the working class everywhere – for example refuse workers in Birmingham are currently fighting a hard battle. Many other workers are in a better position than us to hit the bosses where it hurts – in their pockets. We need to make direct contact with other workers to discover how we can use our respective positions in society more effectively. If workers at ports and airports who handle billions of pounds worth of goods act in a coordinated way with us who work day and night to keep people healthy and cared for acted together, what could we achieve?

Stop whining, it is up to us to change things!

The storm is coming. The state and the rich are preparing for new wars and want us to pay the bill. Workers everywhere are under pressure from their respective governments. If we unite across borders, we can win – without our work, nothing works! As health workers we see everyday that poverty and social depression is the main reason that people get sick. We have to defend the health and dignity of our class. 

We will organise a meeting to discuss the upcoming pay struggle, if you are interested, drop us an email.