Speaking exclusively to HR magazine's sister title Independent Nurse, he said: "There hasn't been a decision taken. We have been quite clear we want the negotiations to succeed. We don't want to see public services disrupted. At the end of the day, trade unions have got a job to do, and I think part of what goes on with the way this is handled it's the politics of a right wing government.
"They have tried, with all this language and talk about 'gold plated pensions', to create a divide in the country between people who hold private sector pensions and those who hold public sector pensions."
"They have tried to build anger about public sector pensions with their language. Also, they know that by provoking a fight with the trade unions, it provokes an internal tension within the labour movement - they know that, it's that Tory governments have always done - and this is a tory government, that the Liberal Democrats are just going along with [it]."
But he added: "I think it's heavily political, the handling of the issue, and pensions shouldn't be. Pensions should be beyond this treatment - these are people's lives we're talking about. They are part of the deal people bought into when they took their jobs and to take part of that away is deeply wrong.
"If you look at the issues, the right is on the union side in terms of the issues, what I won't do is give blanket endorsement to the action they may take. You can disagree about the policy, but it is very hard to then make patients or the public suffer. It depends what form the action takes.
"We are here to represent the best interests of everybody, and I think the wider public interest lies in there being no strike, but I think that means the government should play decently and be fair with the unions."
Talking about the situation for nursing staff in particular, Burnham added: "What I've got to do more for nurses is piece together all of the things that are happening to them. Pensions is the expression of anger, but it's because they are facing an attack on all fronts; jobs may be changing, they may be worried about their job, and then you've got the government swiping their money away from them out of their pay packet through the changes to pensions - it's this combination of things that is utterly wrong. I need to speak about that, and hold the Government to account.
"I don't think it's fair to hit nurses with higher contributions, lower payments and a later retirement age. It's been appalling the way the whole pensions issue has been handled.
"We [the Labour Government] made difficult decisions relating to the NHS pension scheme, and other public sector pension schemes, based on dialogue, on valuation of the schemes and evidence. If we are going to change working ages across the public sector it's got to be linked to the jobs people are doing and the demands of that job, otherwise it can really penalise people who are doing more physically demanding jobs."
