PFI

Nurses asked to do unpaid work to avoid "significant job losses"

Health campaigners have condemned an NHS trust for asking its staff to resign, work for no pay or take unpaid leave in order to reduce its multimillion-pound deficit.

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust, which reported a £16. 7m deficit last year, has sent staff a letter asking them to work unpaid for a day, take six months unpaid leave, take voluntary redundancy or defer taking five days of their holiday until next year to help balance its books.

NHS staff protest outside parliament

Hundreds of NHS workers from 16 different Trade Unions rallied outside Parliament yesterday in opposition to health service privatisation.

United under the banner "NHS Together", doctors, nurses, midwives and support staff rallied in Parliament Square to protest at the pace of NHS reform, financial cutbacks and the government's use of the private sector in health care provision. The protestors were also joined by members of the National Pensioners Convention and the Keep Our NHS Public group.

1999: Dahl Jenson construction strike

Immigrants demonstrated their willingness, when asked, to support British workers in struggle in this victorious strike of 300 building workers employed by different firms.

The week before Mechanical Installers and Pipe Fitters working for Dahl Jenson found that cheques for the last three weeks work had bounced. With massive amounts of overtime being worked some workers had lost as much as £2,000, although these figures were the exception as the workers calculated that the £55,000 in total owed was split between almost 100 workers.

More NHS Cuts?

BBC Report
Interesting points:

> apparently the plan is to centralise A&E into regional 'super centres' (the out of town superstore for health?)

Private finance ‘draining’ NHS trusts

In the wake of a renewed drive to expand Private Finance Initiatives (PFI) across the public sector, it has been revealed that earlier projects have been draining cash at the expense of Trust-owned properties.

PFI allows companies to take out private loans to build major projects such as new hospitals, which are then underwritten and repaid by state funds over long periods of time.

PFI scheme reignites for NHS

Two major victories for government supporters of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) funding for improvements to public services have been approved in the last two weeks.

At St Bartholemew’s hospital in London, £1bn for re-development has been authorised to be split between the facility and the Royal London. The deal will be run on a PFI basis, meaning that companies will effectively loan the hospitals money for the revamp, to be paid back over a 35 year period.

NHS: The cost of privatisation

The government’s controversial private finance initiative is floundering. Patricia Hewitt’s review of the £1.28bn PFI plan for the Barts and The London hospitals trust, prompted by spiralling costs revealed last December, also raises questions about the whole policy.

Professor Allyson Pollock, head of the Centre for International Public Health Policy wrote in the Guardian:

P-P-Privatising the underground, and 'opposition'

As London Underground (LU) workers strike once again, Daniel O’Rourke looks at Labour’s Public-Private Partnership (PPP) scheme which is largely behind the recent problems

New year's eve strike account here:
http://libcom.org/news/article.php/underground-new-year-strike-04012006