The cold darkness of the early Sheffield morning couldn’t chill the enthusiasm or the anger of former UNISON President Sue Highton and her fellow pickets outside Forest Lodge, an NHS forensic unit and continuing needs centre.
Support worker Tracey Turner, who joined the NHS as a 17-year-old in 1981, said what she thought of the pensions plans: “I think it’s disgusting. They shouldn’t be able to do it. We have worked hard for it.”
Jill Hancock, another support worker, stood alongside her: “I’m on £18,000 a year. The cost of living is going up. The cost of our pensions is going up. I’m only just making ends meet now.”
Two miles down the road at Middlewood ambulance station more than 20 uniformed ambulance workers, all UNISON members, were well-organised with a blazing brazier, sausage rolls, pastries and a gazebo. They were taking only emergency calls.
UNISON convenor and paramedic Kev Fairfax said: “Everybody feels we signed up for something and now they’re moving the goalposts.”
With workers facing a later retirement age, he said: “You physically could not do this job for longer.”
And he was angry about the unfairness of the pensions system.
“You have the Royal Bank of Scotland paying out £5m bonuses and nobody says a thing.”
Ambulance staff, he said, were aware of the needs of patients when action was taken.
“The last thing we want is for anybody to lose their life. We are responding to life and limb calls from the picket line.
“It isn’t as if we were asking for a 20 or 30 per cent pay increase. Our pay has been frozen and it will be below inflation for another three years.”
Of the government ministers behind the attack on pensions, he said: “Their pensions are gold-plated, not ours.”