Up to 100,000 UK nurses stage unprecedented walk out
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Thousands of nurses in the UK demonstrate against the deteriorating living conditions.
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Nurses protest outside St Thomas’ Hospital, many of whom just finished their night shift. (RCN)
Nurses in the UK staged a second strike - an unprecedented one amid an increasingly bitter fight with the government for better wages, arguing that patient safety with time is increasingly jeopardized and compensated.
Records project that up to 100,000 members of the Royal College of Nursing in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are holding a one-day strike, just after their last walk-out on Thursday for the first time in the union's history, which is 106 years old.
Read next: UK loses largest number of working days to strikes since 1990: Reports
The nurses' demands include a pay increase to accommodate inflation - and to make up for years worth of salary cuts. However, the British government insists that it cannot afford anything more than a 4-5% rise, despite its continued support for sending millions worth of weapons to Ukraine.
It sums up all the stories @RishiSunak #NursesStrike pic.twitter.com/08dTRmUdd6
— Soumitri Chakraborty (she/her) (@krishnakolidoc) December 19, 2022
Lucy Savage, 21, said "We need more money, we need more staff, we need patient safety." She spoke outside Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool. "We're overworked and underpaid, the NHS (National Health Service) is just a shambles."
Suni George, 45, said his pay barely changed in his 17 years working as a nurse: "We get a lot of tax so even when the annual income looks like it's gone up, we don't have more money," he said outside the same hospital.
The striking nurses, grappling with the cost of living crisis in the UK, come from both the private and public sectors and are demonstrating against the crippling conditions.
Another strike is also coming on December 28, and it will include postal, railway and Border Force staff.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the West, including the UK sought to contain Russia through the imposition of various sanctionary and punitive mechanisms.
But due to the West's overreliance on Russian gas, anti-Russian sanctions have caused more damage to UK citizens than they did to Russia, and as the government struggles to find alternatives to Russian gas, the masses are taking to the streets to voice their opposition to the consequences of the West's war on Ukraine that they have to put up with.
Social dissatisfaction has grown as the UK entered a serious economic crisis earlier this year. Annual inflation in the UK hit 11.1% in October. According to the Bank of England, the UK economy has entered a recession expected to last until the second half of 2024.
