Nurses in the UK's National Health Service (NHS) say they reluctantly voted to strike for better pay as they can barely afford to eat on their wages.
Two members of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which announced the first nationwide strike in its 106-year history on Wednesday, told a British daily newspaper how they struggled to make ends meet — and are even reduced to eating patients' leftover food.
36-year-old mother-of-three Esther, from Zimbabwe, has been working at an NHS hospital in the south of England on an annual salary of £26,000. She is now moving to the north in hope of cutting her housing bill, currently £1,200 per month. But even there average rents are around £1,000 now.
“Yes, I go without meals. Lunch, sometimes breakfast. You can’t go and buy a hot meal at work, it costs £6-7," Esther said. “Sometimes you have to grab extra sandwiches from the patients’ trollies. Of course people will tell you it’s against hospital policy. Some say it’s okay. Most of the time I do that."
"Sometimes they reprimand you, but they have not reported me. It is common to take the leftover food, even the British nurses do this," she said. "It’s only ever the leftovers, and it keeps you going."
The RCN is demanding a pay rise of five per cent more than the rate of retail price inflation — currently running at 12 percent amid the crisis caused by western sanctions and energy import embargoes on Russia. The Department of Health's budget — set by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he was still chancellor of the exchequer — covers only a three per cent offer.
Nurses have long complained their annual pay rises have not made up for the effective cut in earnings due to the seven-year public sector pay freeze imposed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government formed in 2010.
The Zimbabwean said that while nurses are poorly paid in her own country, society helps them out in informal ways. Bus drivers often let them on without paying the fare and fellow citizens give them gifts of food.
“Where we come from, nurses are highly valued, the government can’t pay us enough but in the community they will serve you first,” Esther said.
But since coming to the UK, she has refused charity, saying: "Sometimes in church I see people putting food at the door but you try to maintain your pride, get your own money and buy your own food instead of begging.”
Carmel O’Boyle, a single mother from Liverpool, earns £28,000 per year as a nurse practitioner — two pay grades above a newly-qualified nurse — at a community walk-in medical centre, while also teaching at a local university.
She said the NHS "desperately" needs more nurses as people are living longer and develop more complex medical problems to treat. But it increasingly finds it hard to recruit staff as the wages are no longer competitive with blue-collar jobs.
“We can’t recruit and we can’t retain staff because they just can’t afford to be here,” O'Boyle said. “We have students who are not coming into the profession but are going to supermarket chains with their graduate programs because the wages are higher."
While “none of us came into the profession to be millionaires," she said they should at least "be able to pay our bills."
“Anything that the Government has awarded us has been below inflation and so therefore it’s a pay cut," O'Boyle stressed. “The cost of everything is rising. My energy bill has just tripled. Where does the money come from when your wages don’t keep up?”