‘Fair pay’ is a dangerous fiction
- Doctors and nurses should be honest about their true motive for demanding higher pay
- ‘Fair pay’ across the whole economy would result in both huge labour shortages and unemployment
- Upholding freedom of contract forms the fundamental basis for widespread prosperity
Nurses have now decided to follow the example of resident doctors, and reject the Government’s latest pay offer. The Royal College of Nursing announced this week that 91% of its members voted against accepting a 3.6% pay rise. Resident doctors were offered a 5.4% pay increase but went on strike for a 29% pay increase to ensure ‘full pay restoration’ to 2009 levels.
Both unions are demanding that their members receive ‘fair pay’. Yet as Friedrich Hayek once argued, the only meaningful sense in which we can even debate whether any wage is ‘just’ is by asking if it has been agreed in a free market without deception, fraud or violence. ‘Fair pay’ doesn’t exist; thus, the pleas of doctors and nurses can be rejected outright at the bar of justice.
These medical professionals ought to be honest about their true motive: they want higher pay because it is in their self-interest. Fine, but once this is acknowledged, it’s entirely proper that taxpayers defend their self-interest too and resist their pay increases.
The whole piece is well worth reading as yet another reminder of the misleading way in which the media commonly present these disputes. They give too much credence to the 'fair pay' claim and its many variants and nowhere near enough to human behaviour, and the ancient motive of self-interest.
It is surely reasonable for Wes Streeting to defend taxpayer interests against the claims of medical professionals, our interests against theirs. Unfortunately for Wes, this isn't how it will be presented in the media, hard-nosed realism isn't popular enough for that.
Resident doctors and nurses are ultimately campaigning for their own self-interest – not any empty notions of ‘fair pay’ – and there is nothing wrong with that per se. However, Wes Streeting ought to reject their demands to protect the public’s interests from ever higher taxes and more borrowing. Crucially, resident doctors and nurses must all have their contracts renegotiated, with their right to strike stripped from them, to make sure they can’t hold the taxpayer to ransom once again. Nothing short of that will do.
2 comments:
Perhaps argue that there is a fixed pay budget but each group can have a big increase if they wish - but since the budget is fixed there will have to be proportionately fewer employees.
DJ - they could do that, but any system is likely to be corrupted by constant tales of woe about overwork and understaffing. Doctors and nurses are in an artificially strong position and they know it.
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