Scottish care workers should be as valued as nurses
Scotland’s social care workers are still not being properly valued by the Scottish Government. The GMB union is protesting today the decision in the Scottish Budget to not increase public sector care worker pay to the promised £15 per hour but instead to increase it by only 85p to £13.45 per hour. While the increase is still above inflation and thus does represent a real-terms pay increase for carers it still means that public sector care workers will be paid less than the average Scottish salary and less than that required for a single person to meet the UK Minimum Income Standard and so is below the line required for that person to sustain a “decent” life, even if they work full time as a carer – which many carers do not.
By contrast, a newly qualified nurse in the NHS can expect to be paid £17.23 per hour or the equivalent of £33,247 for a full time role.
There are, of course, large degrees of difference between the process of becoming a qualified nurse and a qualified carer but this is as much part of the problem as a vision of the solution for many of the problems in the care sector.
Low public sector pay isn’t just an issue for the public sector carers directly, but for all carers everywhere. The private care sector is known for paying their staff substantially less than public sector peers (a practice which allows the private companies to extract more profits from the sector) but there is a limit to this practice. As the gap in pay between private and public carers grows, the incentive to quit the low paid job in favour of a higher paid one becomes stronger.
In other words, while the Scottish Government has no direct control over things like the Minimum Wage, they can raise the effective wage floor in the private sector simply by demanding that public sector carers are paid enough that the private sector must raise wages to retain workers.
Worker retention in general is also reduced not just by higher pay but by higher standards of training and support for workers. As in our vision for a National Care Service, we want to see carers properly valued for their vital service and that means providing training and ongoing career progression.
Ultimately this means making the care progression start to look a lot more like the nursing profession – a fully qualified role with even degree-level accreditations expected as part of a career path.
In other words, where the Scottish Government is quibbling over a few pennies an hour for carers, they should be building up a care sector where carers are as valued politically, socially and economically as NHS nurses are (or should be too).
This is why we supported and still support a National Care Service despite eventually opposing the specific plans proposed last year. The NCS should ultimately become for care as the NHS is for health. We hope that the next Parliament after the elections will agree with us and work towards that vision.