How do you feel about nurses? You know, the backbone of the NHS. They are unfailingly polite, kind and helpful to patients. These days they've all spent 4 years getting a degree and doing on-the-ward training, so they're well-qualified. A lot of them are women with children who have to spend some of their wages on childcare to accommodate their work, and come off hellish 12 hour shifts to resume their lives looking after their families. In Scotland at least, they don't have to spend money on parking, but they often still have the nightmare of finding somewhere to park because modern hospitals don't seem ever to provide enough parking spaces in their grounds. Not for staff anyway. They're not that well-paid but at least this coming year they're getting a pay rise.
How about GPs? Yep, good people, all of them. We need more. Consultants in hospitals, do we approve of them? Oh yes, they're highly skilled and very hard-working. The same goes for people like radiographers, physiotherapists, the pharmacists who provide your drugs when you're being discharged from hospital and all the other support workers. They're great, right? Ward cleaners, are they okay? And porters? I'm not sure most of us even see them, but hospitals can't run without them. The GPs and consultants are pretty well paid but the rest? Not so well.
How about the admin staff that arrange our appointments at surgeries and hospital clinics. Well, yes, they're okay, although we really only approve of actual clinicians because know that the medics and the nurses do but we're maybe not too sure what the admin people do. Just shuffling bits of paper. And as for managers - well, we hate them. Too many of them. All pulling down enormous salaries. Doing nothing. That's not true, of course. We just don't know what they do.
Then there's local councils. Over-staffed. Sit around all day drinking coffee. So some of them have degrees in business management and accountancy or personnel management, but they've no real idea of how a business runs, have they? Yes, they collect council tax, but what else?
Apart from the ones who work in education teaching our kids and working as teachers and classroom assistants to support kids with learning difficulties. Not to mention educational psychologists who do their best with diminishing resources to support families and young people with learning or mental health issues.
And the social workers who arrange day care for members of our families with learning disabilities and residential care for the elderly. And the staff who hire folk to supervise crossing patrols, make and serve school breakfasts and lunches in the canteens. And the health & safety bods that everybody hates till something goes wrong. And the maintenance guys who keep the buildings working and the ICT people who keep the technology working. How about the janitors? Ask a teacher who the most important people in a school are. Not the heidie. The office staff and the janitors.
I hope you can see a pattern developing here: for every highly-qualified 'expert' in public services, whether it's medicine and local council departments, we need an army of backroom people to make their work - well, work. But when there's a squeeze on resources, it's the people at the bottom of the wages heap that do worst. First to be paid off. Last to be given a pay rise.
Frankly, we need to rethink the idea of work, start to see work as teamwork and bring the wages of the poorest paid closer to the wages of the best paid. We may be able to do that in Scotland through our own parliament. But we need to take steps now. Do we have any powers in Holyrood to stop Westminster removing the protection of the EU's Working Hours Directive which it seems they are planning? We've seen that Holyrood can use tax breaks for the NHS and local councils to protect the poorest paid. The 2017 budget was a fair start. But can we do more? Can we challenge the Scottish Government to be more daring?
Yet again, let me say I'm not SNP - I'm a Green with my own Green ideas who is looking for more. I was pleasantly surprised by the tax bands put together by the Scottish Government. I'd seen tax-raising for Holyrood as a huge trap put in place by the last UK Labour government and then by the Tories. I was wrong. There was some clever thinking went into these tax bands. Now that the Scottish Government has started to think radically, what else can we do?
