Genuinely contributing

Young Robert Colville on Bluesky, me neither but he seems to have a column in the Sunday Times, appears to think that low-paid workers don’t ‘genuinely contribute’ to our society. Which got me thinking.

I was an auxiliary nurse when I left school. These days it’s known as a healthcare assistant. Apart from all the skills I had to learn while doing it – feeding octogenarians pureed food, negotiating with men with dementia who thought the ward was a Nazi prison camp, laying out the corpses of the recently deceased – it was an unskilled job.

I started on a thirty bed orthopaedic trauma ward working fourteen-hour shifts and I’m tempted to say it was very demanding work for a wet behind the ears nineteen-year-old, but that isn’t accurate because it was very demanding work for anyone.

My main recollections are of relentless rounds of arse wiping and bedpan juggling for elderly people with fractured femurs, and slightly younger patients who’d succumbed to car crashes, ice slips and ladder falls. I saw maggots in wounds, visible bones, regular death, and more faeces than you could shake a rolled-up copy of the Sunday Times at.

I then worked nights on the bank pool for the best part of a decade. This took me all over the hospital helping people who’d had strokes, heart attacks, ODs, A&E brawlers, resuscitations, and the occasional quiet night on elective orthopaedics which inevitably meant getting redeployed once the bed manager realised I might spend some of the night sitting still.

I started in 2001 and was taking home £880 a month. It remains the hardest I’ve ever worked for the least amount of money, and this was in an era when the NHS was still functioning as it should have been. I cannot imagine how hard it is now.

I note that I’m almost the same age as Robert Colvile. I don’t know if he was cutting the toenails of a homeless man who only took his socks off once a year when he was nineteen, but I do know that if I’d fallen ill and needed a stay in hospital, my National Insurance contributions would not have been contributing enough to the collective pot to pay for that care.

So this is my way of saying thank you to him for going to Cambridge, working hard and subsidising the rest of us in low paid work. Because while holding the hand of a dying woman as their family races to be with them is certainly demanding, if you were earning minimum wage when you did it, you weren’t genuinely contributing.