Junior doctors ready for battle

Submitted by Matthew on 2 March, 2016 - 1:41

Yannis Gourtsoyannis is a junior doctor in London who is a member of the BMA Junior Doctors' Committee and active in Momentum NHS and the People’s Assembly. He spoke to Solidarity on 23 February.


How do you think the dispute has gone so far?

There’s one recent development which I should highlight. It may sound obscure but it’s actually very significant. The Junior Doctors Committee recently voted to repudiate the concept of “cost neutrality”. The concept of a “cost neutral” basis for negotiations has always served as ideological cover for de facto government attacks to wages and conditions .

So in repudiating cost neutrality the BMA has therefore clearly indicated that it will not accept any contract which is not predicated on adequate NHS investment. We have rejected continuing austerity in the NHS.

The attack on junior doctors is occurring within a much wider context,; all NHS staff; nurses, midwives, occupation therapists and many others are seeing a stagnation in their real wages and an erosion of their terms and conditions. We all have a common struggle and a common enemy. Austerity is being used to attack workers’ rights as well as undermine the economic foundations of a viable NHS. You cannot provide a seven day service on the present five day’s worth of funding funding. In attempting to do so this is the government is deliberately setting out to harm the NHS and prepare the ground for accelerating privatization.

In my view we’re in a good place. Sure, it's going to be a tough fight, but I am in no doubt that we will win this. If you look back a year or two few observers would have predicted that the BMA would be so capable of standing up for itself as a union and making such big decisions about industrial action. The fact that the government has said it wants to impose the contract is a sign of weakness on their part. I’m very proud of the BMA for having followed through on two very successful strikes, and for planning escalated action as we go into the spring.

The BMA has shown a real willingness to respond to it's member’s ideas, hopes and demands. 98 percent of junior doctors in England voted for strikes, and that was on very robust 76 percent turnout. It is therefore the height of absurdity for the government to claim, as it often does, that the BMA is not representative of junior doctors in England.

I’m seeing a membership that’s unified, that’s confident and that is undergoing a real political education; forged in the course of the seminal industrial struggle of a generation.

How do you assess these new strikes planned?

I am satisfied with our plan going forward. We have just announced a further raft of six days of action, each chunk composed of 48 hours of “emergency care only”. So it’s the same model as before, but extending it from 24 hours to 48 hours. This ratchets up the pressure.

The new dates currently extend to the end of April,; and we’ll still have a mandate for action beyond April. This mandate includes the possibility of a full walk out.

What kind of wider support and solidarity would you like to see?

First of all I’d like to say that junior doctors are immensely grateful for the huge support we’ve already received, verbally from every national union and also from the many, many trade unionists who’ve shaken our hands on the picket lines up and down the country. We’ve welcomed support from the Labour Party too, including some good stuff on the specifics of our contracts during Parliamentary questions

However, what I want to see from the Labour Party is a much more robust set of arguments that link the issues of the junior doctors’ dispute to the wider fabric of this country’s politics,. This is fundamentally about the politics of austerity. The Labour leadership needs to insist that the Labour Party as a whole take on the wider arguments and start to mobilise support for our action.

I have also been repeatedly told that other trade unionists have been really inspired by our determination. It would be great to see the leadership of the other Unions standing up for their members’ own interests too. Of course it’s a difficult situation and many unions have memberships that are more fragmented and in a weaker position than ours, for instance in the private sector, so there are huge challenges, but still we need to see the movement step up to the plate and fight.

It’s also worth saying that we’re seeing a new social movement emerging around the NHS, in terms of defending NHS funding and opposing privatisation and also health inequalities. We’ve seen many thousands of junior doctors take to the streets, we’re seeing a significant march planned by People’s Assembly for [16] April, and of course there’s also the emergence of Momentum and within it the excellent work of Momentum NHS, which is very new but has done some great work already. It would be fantastic to see the whole Labour Party taking up that agenda.

You mentioned about doctors’ ideas changing?

Initially when this contract dispute blew into the open last summer, a lot of junior doctors were quite puzzled why the government would choose to pick a battle with such a respected profession doing such an important job. Many pointed out the fallacies of government pronouncements. However, doctors are now coming to the realisation that the government is not simply ill informed with regards to the realities of doctors’ working lives. It is becoming clear that the government is deliberately undermining NHS workers’ terms and conditions as part of its plan to undermine the NHS as a publicly funded institution.

People have started to see the way the government has attacked the BMA and the way it attacks all unions, for instance with the Trade Union Bill. And they’ve linking the cost-cutting agenda to the wider context of austerity. So I feel optimistic about the fact that doctors are capable, despite a lack of free time and unsocial hours, of getting political . I will say it again, this dispute has been a huge education for us.

I’ve spoken to junior doctors who were previously disparaging of the Labour Party but have been very impressed with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and the support of the Labour Party as a whole; including at the grassroots level.

What impact is all this having on the BMA?

Thus contract dispute is transforming our Union. It is undergoing a baptism of fire. We have taken strike action for the first time in 40 years. The BMA has seen a huge influx of new members, membership coverage now approaching 90% in most parts of the country. We’re seeing a lot more engagement at local meetings, we’re seeing big regional meetings and we expect massive attendance at this year’s annual conference, which is why we’ve booked a bigger venue and expanded it to cover two days instead of one.

Could it be a model for building up other trade unions among young workers?

Yes, of course. As a Labour member, I also see many parallels between what’s happened in the BMA and in the Labour Party under its new leadership. If you fight, if you are sincere and if you make bold arguments then people will come to you. You earn their respect. When the BMA took a courageous stance junior doctors recognised it as such and engaged. There’s a lesson there for other trade unions: when a union chooses to really stand up for the workers it represents, when it makes the necessary and tough choices then people will join, people will fight for it, people will commit their time and passion to that Union.

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