Nurses are in need but RMT bosses act out of sheer greed

IMAGINE two professions. One has an average salary of just under £35,000. Pay for those in the profession has fallen by over 20 per cent in real terms since 2010. It has 46,828 vacancies across England – the worst staffing crisis it has ever experienced, and up from 38,814 vacancies last year.

- Stephen Pollard

The other profession has an average salary of £59,000 and there are no vacancies – in fact the job is so popular that when they are advertised applications outweigh jobs available by 300 to one in the South, and 750 to one in the North.

Which of those jobs would you say has the greatest grievance – one that might, for example, drive it to strike?

Not really much of a decision, is it? As you’ve doubtless realised, the first profession is nursing, the second, train drivers.

Nursing is in crisis. The number of vacancies is around a tenth of the workforce. Pay has been falling behind at the same time as working conditions have worsened – in large part due to low wages that mean staff shortages are the norm.

Whether or not you think nurses should go on strike, their case for more pay is so obvious as to be almost unarguable.

AS FOR train drivers? There is only one appropriate word for the RMT rail union’s strikes, which are designed to hit everyone as hard as possible. That word is greed.

Deserted streets and shops at Christmas, cruelly sending some into bankruptcy, are the purpose of the strikes – to make things so awful that the Government caves in.