\n<\/p>\n
\u201cB<\/span>ecause you\u2019re worth it,\u201d goes the ad. But knowing who is worth what is even harder to determine than it was half a century ago. So as doctors vote in a strike ballot, how will the public weigh up their just reward?<\/p>\n Some 50,000 resident doctors \u2013 formerly known as junior doctors \u2013 are deciding whether to walk out again in England. Their year-and-a-half-long series of strikes ended with Wes Streeting agreeing a 22.3% pay rise over two years. Now their seniors, hospital consultants, are about to vote on striking to reclaim the 26% the British Medical Association (BMA) says their pay has fallen by since 2008.<\/p>\n The public backed striking doctors last year despite the 1.3m healthcare appointments lost, which cost the NHS \u00a31.5bn. Beyond pay, that was a protest against a government that had stripped the NHS bare: public satisfaction with the health service was at a peak in 2010 but by last year it had fallen to its lowest since records began. There was a strong sense among staff and the public that this was about defending the state of the service.<\/p>\n Would doctors get that public backing now? YouGov finds 48% opposed to further strike action, with 39% of voters in favour. Times have changed: the NHS was the big gainer in this month\u2019s spending review, with extra funding designed to cut waiting times and increase GP appointments, though it is still under intense strain. Senior medics, including the former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Clare Gerada, wrote a letter to the Guardian imploring doctors not to strike again. \u201cThe NHS is at a more perilous state than at any time in our careers,\u201d they wrote. \u201cA doctors\u2019 strike would further diminish the ability of the NHS to deliver, and play into the hands of those who don\u2019t believe in an NHS that is publicly funded and based on need not want.\u201d Streeting has just awarded resident doctors an average pay rise of <\/strong>5.4%, more than the rest of the NHS.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the issue: despite last year\u2019s good post-strike rise, the BMA says resident doctors\u2019 pay has fallen by 23% in real terms since 2008, and they intend to get it back, as do the teachers, whose pay has fallen behind like all the public sector. This is a poorer country, with growth practically stagnant, battered like the rest by world events but uniquely stricken by Brexit too. Public and private sector pay has fallen over the past few years, despite a slight uptick recently. This people know instinctively from how far their money doesn\u2019t go: had pay kept growing at pre-financial crash rates, public pay would be 56% higher and the private sector would be 40% better off. These stark figures underlie deep social discontent and distrust of government. No wonder unions strive to bring back better times, calling the doctors\u2019 pay offer \u201cderisory\u201d and \u201cinsulting\u201d.<\/p>\n Well, is it? Full Fact\u2019s reliable analysis shows foundation year doctors get a \u00a338,831 basic salary while the most qualified resident doctors \u2013 48% of them \u2013 get \u00a373,992: the salient fact is many of these doctors will become consultants whose earnings escalate to more than \u00a3100,000 a year.<\/p>\n Is that a lot or not? What you think depends on what you earn, but very few understand where they stand on the scale. Keep focusing here on a string of numbers, because they are the way we live now. Median pay is \u00a337,430, with half earning more and half earning less. When aggregated across a year, the minimum wage has just risen to \u00a325,396.80. To enter the top 10% of earners you must have a salary of more than \u00a365,000. Estimates vary, but about \u00a3180,000 is the threshold for entering the top 1%.<\/p>\n It may be no comfort to public sector employees that the prime minister\u2019s salary has sharply fallen behind. His \u00a3172,153 pay, not quite within the top 1%, should be \u00a3305,770 had it kept up with inflation since 2009. Using the PM\u2019s pay as a comparator \u2013 as anti-public-sector rightwingers do to castigate any public servants earning more \u2013 makes little sense: some headteachers running multi-academy trusts can reach \u00a3300,000, as can CEOs of large city councils.<\/p>\n Are those sums a lot? They are peanuts compared with private sector high-flyers. The opaquely funded TaxPayers\u2019 Alliance has a \u201cpublic sector rich list\u201d that fails to make comparisons with private top pay. Six-figure earners in the public sphere, running a large school or hospital, have a far more complex task than company CEOs earning millions for single-performance indicators: the bottom line and the share price. New research from the High Pay Centre, funded by the Aberdeen Financial Fairness Trust, just reported that the median FTSE 100 CEO pay is 78 times greater than their median employee\u2019s pay. Tesco\u2019s CEO on \u00a39.23m makes 431 times more than a median Tesco worker. It\u2019s been six years since revealing these pay ratios became mandatory for large listed companies, but high hopes have been dashed because it has changed nothing: exposing gigantic inequality has not shamed boardrooms into reconsidering their values on pay.<\/p>\n \u201cFair pay\u201d is a slippery concept. Fair pay agreements for every sector are government policy, starting experimentally with social care, for employers and unions to agree legally binding minimum rates and conditions affordable in their industry. They reflect the old wages councils devised by Winston Churchill to protect \u201csweated labour\u201d, which were later abolished by Margaret Thatcher. When she disempowered unions, workers\u2019 pay fell while the top pay, off the leash, shot up stratospherically, where it remains.<\/p>\n In the light of all that grotesque distortion of worth, doctors and other valued public servants deserve high rewards. But in the everyday world where growth and pay have long stagnated, people seeing resident doctors\u2019 significant pay rise last July may resent them striking again, this time against an NHS at last struggling to its feet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cBecause you\u2019re worth it,\u201d goes the ad. But knowing who is worth what is even harder to determine than it was half a century ago. So as doctors vote in a strike ballot, how will the public weigh up their just reward? Some 50,000 resident doctors \u2013 formerly known as junior doctors \u2013 are deciding<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1206,2063,366,1700,2062,1040,1127,1457,1128],"class_list":{"0":"post-9626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-divided","10":"tag-doctors","11":"tag-messy","12":"tag-money","13":"tag-pay","14":"tag-polly","15":"tag-relationship","16":"tag-toynbee"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}