1%? Up yours! We need health workers' and patients' power!

Things are heating up – the 1% pay increase insult dished out by the government led to a lot of angry discussions in tea rooms and on ward floors.

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on March 5, 2021

This is a proposal to other comrades and workers’ militants in the health sector to exchange their experiences and discuss how to support both self-organised and effective struggle and the expansion of workers’ and patients’ control. Here are some reasons why we think this kind of network is necessary. If you think similarly, please get in touch. We will have an online meeting on the 11th of March 2021.

1. The widespread view that it is ‘our NHS’ prevents us from taking the offensive steps needed to defend our and the patients’ conditions

It is not a coincidence that we see more offensive disputes amongst outsourced health workers than within the NHS. Trade unions, more often than not, are reluctant to rock the boat, while claiming at the same time that the NHS has to be defended as a ‘public good’. While we have to fight for good and free healthcare and against the deterioration of working conditions, we also have to fight the illusion that this will be guaranteed by the formal umbrella of the NHS.

Over the last decades we have seen a slow erosion of conditions for both workers’ and patients. The hierarchies and power relations between management and workers within the NHS are as stark if not starker than those in ‘private’ corporations. Trust managers could always point the finger at the politicians and blame them for the fact that ‘there is no money’ and that’s why health workers often earn less than their fellow workers at Amazon; or that nurses have to pay for their training, while in other countries without a ‘national health service’ they are paid for it. No wonder that a third of nurses don’t finish their studies. Both politicians and management have contained the resistance against all this with the threat of further ‘privatisation’. The trade unions have toed the line, despite the fact that beneath the shell of a ‘public institution’ many services within the NHS are privatised already. But even as a state-owned apparatus, the NHS was never in workers’ and working class patients’ hands.

2. Only self-confident and collectively organised workers can guarantee health and safety during and beyond the pandemic

Since the pandemic started, 850 NHS workers have died of Covid and between August 2020 and February 2021 there were 39,000 cases of patients catching Covid while in hospital,In December 2020, 1 out of 4 people who were hospitalised with Covid caught it in hospital. The public attention is on the lack of personal protective equipment and the trade unions are quick to blame ‘outsourcing’ as one of the reasons for an increase in internal infections, e.g. due to the fact that 1,000 full-time cleaner positions have been cut since 2010. While all of this will have played a role, at the same time there is no quick fix.

The main issue is that workers often don’t question management decisions, due to lack of solidarity and power. On the respiratory ward, where one of us works, management’s decision to put both Covid and non-Covid patients on the same ward was not questioned. The decision to declare the ward Covid-free, while some test results had not come back yet, was not questioned either. Management was not quizzed on why there were daily updated figures for Covid patients at a Trust level, but no such statistics about how many staff got infected. On a bigger scale, it wasn’tt questioned why a nearby Nightingale hospital that was set up to care exclusively for Covid patients remained empty, while the local hospital had to accept a crammed-in mix of patients.

While a lack of collectivity hindered many workers to raise health and safety concerns, other workers in the sector found new forms of coordination during the pandemic. A community midwife we interviewed told us how online forums that are usually only used for ‘professional questions’ became sites where workers discussed which work tasks should be prioritised, how to work safely and how to deal with reluctant or disorganised management. The question of ‘who is in control’ became more concrete.

3. The bigger framework of the NHS is changing, but it is equally important to analyse the day-to-day restructuring in each department and Trust

The left preoccupies itself with the new White Paper about future ‘Integrated Care Systems’, new forms of contractual relationships with and within the NHS, and the government’s current budget revelations government. We agree that it is important to look at the wider framework and tendencies, e.g. it makes a difference if money comes from the state or from private corporations such as Operose Health Ltd. that recently took over a large chain of GP surgeries across London. These changes affect the general conditions for our struggle. But the main conditions for workers are decided in the direct relationship with management on a departmental and Trust level.

Also we see a proliferation of ‘apprenticeships’ within the NHS, and individual Trusts take advantage of the cheap labour (sometimes 25% below the minimum wage) to various degrees. An increasing number of functions and work tasks are delegated to the lower paying wage bands. While wages are fixed within the NHS band system, management at one of the Trusts where we work could offer £300 per month ‘risk bonus’ for people who take on extra shifts on Covid wards. We are critical of such ‘monetarisation of risk’, it just proves that local management can pay if they think they have to. While bank agency staff normally lose money and booked shifts if they call in sick, workers in some Trusts were able to enforce payment for them during the pandemic, in order to avoid them coming in sick or after exposure risk. In other trusts this was not enforced. Certain branches with a string rank-and-file union structure, such as Guys and St.Thomas’ in London were able to enforce particular concessions, such as higher staffing levels. The problem is that these differences and achievements of pressure from below are not communicated more widely.

4. There are many local disputes in the sector, but we don’t have the means and connections to learn from them

This problem of lack of open communication becomes apparent when we look at the current industrial actions in the sector. Here we mainly hear the official versions from the various unions who are involved:

* In April 2020, outsourced ISS cleaners at Lewisham Hospital went on strike for better pay. According to the GMB, they obtained an increase to £10.55 per hour.
* In December 2020, about 50 Serco maintenance staff at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital accepted a 4.5% pay increase negotiated by Unite after the threat of strike. At Royal Berkshire hospital, Kingdom Services Group security went on five days industrial action for a £12 an hour pay demand. At Great Ormond Street hospital, domestic workers have fought to be taken back iin-house once the current contract runs out in August 2021 – the UVW threatened strike action.
* In January 2021, porters went on 11 days of strike action organised by Unison against ‘fire and re-hire’ by the NHS Trust at Heartlands in Birmingham. Management wants to impose more flexible shift times.
* In February 2021 at Airedale hospital, AGH Solutions porters and domestics engaged in a dispute for equal pay. GMB said employees of AGH Solutions, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the health Trust, are being paid different rates for doing the same job. The outsourcing happened in 2018, and since then, new starters earn £1 less; according to the bosses the lowest category earn £18,586, which is basically the same as NHS Band 2.
* In March 2021, more than 150 porters, cleaners, switchboard and catering staff employed at Cumberland Infirmary by facilities company Mitie, took a first day of action with Unison over missing payments for working unsocial hours. Mitie workers also took action with the GMB at Epsom & St Helier NHS Trust for unpaid wages.

These disputes affect mainly the outsourced fringe. While conditions ‘inside’ the NHS are not much better, it seems that the unions are more reluctant to combat low wages and irregular shifts on a Trust level. The second problem is that we hear little about the actual strength and weaknesses of these strikes. How does the NHS staff react to them? Do they actually hurt management and how? How does management try to undermine the strike? Part of the problem here is that all unions try to present themselves as victorious, which impedes a critical self-reflection. We have to create worker-focused forums for this task. Even within unions, these strikes are often not communicated, e.g. although one of us is a Unison member they were not informed about the two ongoing disputes in nearby Trusts. There was no attempt to engage in local solidarity activities.

5. Current national pay campaigns are promising, but they remain too distant from our day-to-day power struggles with management

Boosted by the junior doctor dispute and the widespread discontent amongst nurses we see the development of a national pay campaign. While actual rallies and local activities have been made difficult by the pandemic, based on previous experiences with such kind of campaigns we can say that they often remain fairly symbolic. Some of us attended online rallies of the NHS15 campaign together with 60 to 80 other people, but there was very little information about how the wider campaign is supposed to link up to the actual power struggle on the ground. The main proposals were to let fellow workers sign a petition and to hand it to local management.

Then we hear that around certain nuclei, such as stronger union branches in London, bigger groups of nurses are able to congregate and plan certain actions, such as a 3,000 health-worker strong demonstration to parliament. These nuclei and actions are not taken as a starting point, instead the campaign relies too much on online networking of individuals. Overall the campaign remains limited also on a ‘professional level’, focusing on nurses and talking less about the even greater need of healthcare assistants or porters and cleaners for a wage raise. As usual we have the problem that the actual disputes remain locally isolated and divided by unions, while the national pay campaigns remain toothless. Still, there is a fair chance that by participating in these efforts, working class militants in the sector are able to find each other and discuss alternatives, based on both local shop-floor power and wider coordination.

6. There is a lot to learn from health workers abroad, but a parochial view that ‘the NHS is different’ has prevented us from doing so

We have a lot to learn from experiences abroad. It seems that due to the recent focus on ‘national politics’ (Labour party, Brexit) and the ‘national character’ of the health service, the working class left in the UK is more blindfolded than in other countries. For many NHS campaigns, the reference to the bad health system in the US and the ‘threat of take-over of our national treasure’ by foreign investors is the main form of negative internationalism. But nurses in the US especially are everything but defenceless victims of the private health corporations. Unlike in the UK, in the US there were actual large-scale walk-outs during the pandemic against bad health and safety standards, such as most recently at the Albany Medical Centre in New York state or at eleven nursing homes owned by Infinity Healthcare Management in Chicago in December 2020, involving hundreds of nurses. In January 2021 we saw hospital strikes and department occupations at hospitals in Toulouse in France. Workers were protesting at recent failures to replace 12 nurses and management’s demands to work beyond their usual hours without pay. After 24 hours of strike and occupations, workers won on most of their demands. Eight new nurses will be recruited as well as other staff. Any overtime work will be paid and voluntary. In Greece doctors went on strike in February 2021, complaining that intensive care units are at 80% capacity. Thanks to wider political collaboration we have good contacts with healthcare workers abroad, for example friends in Czech Republic were able to participate in a rank-and-file network of several hundred nurses across several hospitals that was able to take industrial action and enforce wage hikes.

7 . We can start with some basic steps

We don’t need to re-invent the wheel, instead we want to create a basic forum of militant health workers to facilitate the following:

* the exchange of experience concerning concrete conditions and concessions won on a departmental or Trust/company level;
* the exchange of reports about the ongoing disputes that look behind the official union announcements;
* the circulation of relevant international news about struggles in the sector, focusing on first-hand reports and direct correspondence that go deeper than the official media;
* the exchange of material that we use in our local situation, official union branch material or independent leaflets and newsletters;
* the creation of leaflets with relevant reports that can be used for local distribution amongst colleagues;
* the discussion about the wider significance of struggles in the health sector for the struggle against the current social order and for a classless society.

This is not meant as an alternative to existing campaigns or organisations, but as a forum of reflection and exchange of militant workers in the sector. If you are interested, please get in touch.

[email protected]

Comments

Spikymike

3 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Spikymike on March 8, 2021

It's a sound approach and right to be critical of the usual preoccupation of the traditional left with the public versus private angle of protests. Public expressions of support for all NHS workers and their pickets can be worthwhile if well organised and big enough to resist police restrictions on the pretext of breaching government covid restrictions but are not a sufficient way forward in resisting the current attacks. Yesterdays tiny socially distanced street protest organised by some SWP health workers in Central Manchester got them moved on by the police and fines adding up to £10,220!

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on March 30, 2021

Our next meeting is on the 8th of April - if comrades in the sector are interested, please drop us a line:

[email protected]

Here are the minutes of the last meeting:

Attendance
A dozen fellow workers attended the meeting, many of us are health workers in the community (homeless mental health, GP services, donor centre), others in hospitals (A&E, intensive care, respiratory, clinical lab), others are active in local health initiatives. We are based in various locations (London, Leeds, Bristol, Birmingham, Leicester, Northern Ireland).

Discussion
We mainly talked about the current pay dispute and how it relates to the situation on the shop-floor. Primarily fellow workers working in hospitals mentioned that people are angry and discussing the 1% pay ‘offer’, in other situations people were either pretty isolated or sarcastic. So far the unions haven’t organised anything concrete yet where we work. One of us remarked that in the recent past it has been the lower pay grades in particular (porters, HCAs etc.) who have pushed collective action. In Northern Ireland the government announced a 500 pound extra bonus but now it seems it may have implications on benefits so some workers may be worst off if they accept this bonus.

The question came up to which extent the main issue is pay – as work-load, stress, long hours, under-staffing often seems more significant. This also seems to be the case in other countries, such as Germany, where nurses achieved significant pay rises, but could not enforce better staffing ratios. Another friend mentioned conflicts around casual / bank contracts in the blood donation centre where they worked. We talked about the skewed relationship between carers and patients, where the carers become ‘gatekeepers’ for the organisation. The relation between health and class is often ignored. During a possible pay dispute these issues might also come up and should be discussed widely. Another issue is how the hierarchical relationships (doctors vs. nurses; nurses vs. donor staff/assistants; intensive care units vs. wards) will play out.

We reflected on some recent disputes, e.g. the successful strike threat at Leicester hospital against outsourcing of cleaning / portering to a subsidiary company of the trust; or the health visitors strike in Licolnshire. Some of us took part in the pension strike, with mixed feelings. On one hand it was good to see support from other people during a mid-night walk-out when the dispute started, on the other hand people felt that the union did not organise enough on the ground and that a 1-day strike had little effect. A friend reported how they defended mental health services: Commissioners/managers saw to cut a long standing team massively, impose new remit etc. The union/s couldn’t help unless it hit legal threshold – what was proposed didn’t. Local strategy helped interest the public/community which brought pressure/leverage to commissioners

Next steps and meeting
We agreed that we will meet monthly, the next meeting will be on Thursday, 8th of April. If the pay campaign speeds up we can organise ad-hoc meetings.

We said we would feedback to the others about local events, branch meetings etc. that we take part in during the build-up of the campaign.

Friends of the ACG and others are in process of writing a pamphlet about the health sector, we can collaborate and discuss together.

We agreed that it would be good to have a clear structure of the next meetings, e.g. a presentation or specific topic (e.g. the question of ‘over-work’). We will try to invite a fellow worker from the US to speak about recent disputes in US hospitals.

We said we would set up an archive / forum in order to gather material that can be useful in future disputes, e.g. in form of leaflets.

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on April 6, 2021

Meeting of our health workers' network coming up on Thursday 7pm. We discuss with fellow workers from Germany about hospital strikes there and about our local situations at work. If you are interested, get in touch: [email protected]
https://healthworkersunited.wordpress.com/2021/03/18/meeting-minutes-11th-of-march-2021/

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on April 9, 2021

Meeting with hospital worker from Chicago - preparing for industrial action!
Monday 12th, at 7pm UK time! We will also hear more about hospital strikes in the US in general. If you want to join the meeting, please contact: [email protected]

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on April 13, 2021

Short text on current development in the pay campaign - UNISONs divisive pay recommendation in Scotland...

https://healthworkersunited.wordpress.com/2021/04/13/warning-signals-the-unison-scotland-sell-out-of-the-nhs-workers-pay-campaign/

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on April 14, 2021

Minutes of our last meeting and a call to follow us on Twitter for international struggle updates:

https://healthworkersunited.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/minutes-meeting-8th-of-april-2021/

https://healthworkersunited.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/follow-us-for-regular-updates-on-struggles-of-health-workers-around-the-globe/

AngryWorkersWorld

2 years 11 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on April 20, 2021

Report on collective action by ICU nurses and divisions between permanent and agency staff

https://healthworkersunited.wordpress.com/2021/04/19/example-of-action-of-itu-nurses-resulting-in-better-pay-for-bank-staff/

AngryWorkersWorld

1 year 8 months ago

Submitted by AngryWorkersWorld on June 28, 2022

Dear all,

Things are heating up, also amongst NHS workers. Together with comrades from the ACG we have recently published a new book on conditions and struggles in the NHS:

https://www.facebook.com/Sick-of-it-all-109420585144737

On the 9th of July 2022 we will have a book presentation in London together with Jonathan Neale, who wrote a great book on the NHS strike 1982. A new review of the book can be found here:

https://www.angryworkers.org/2022/06/28/review-of-memoirs-of-a-callous-picket-by-jonathan-neale/

Get your free ticket for the event here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/sick-of-it-all-work-enquiry-and-struggle-in-the-nhs-tickets-374528433627

Spread the word, last not least amongst your fellow health workers!

In solidarity

Some
AngryHealthWorkers