Support for Mid Yorkshire Health struggle in the Mirror


On 17 May, the Daily Mirror carried an excellent column by Paul Routledge about the important struggle taking place in Mid Yorkshire Health Trust.
The Socialist has been the only national paper consistently covering the dispute so far but we welcome this article in the Mirror.
Paul explains the important battle being waged in defence of trade union rights and the role being played by Socialist Party member and Unison branch secretary Adrian O’Malley as well as his Unite counterpart, Maria Thompson. Here are some sections of the Mirror’s article.

“This new package of measures would effectively scupper the ability of Unison members, numbering more than 3,000, to choose full-time union reps on the NHS payroll.

The cost to the health service of this long-standing arrangement is probably less than £50,000 a year. It is money well spent on good industrial relations, easing life at work in the cash-strapped NHS.

It certainly pales into insignificance alongside the millions of pounds spent by Mid Yorks Trust bosses on outside consultants – £986,292 to Ernst & Young in April alone – to tell them how to do their job.

It beggars belief that the NHS should be allowed to waste enormous sums of taxpayers’ money on advising managers how to manage, while devoting thousands of man hours to stuffing the unions and employees who belong to it.

But that’s what life is like in your modernised, top-down, reformed, commercialised health service. It is a captive of the business mentality […]

Behind the human resources psychobabble is a clear intention to stuff the union.

Less time for anyone to represent the members, and only then with the permission of the bosses […]

Why is all this happening? Well, the Mid Yorks NHS Trust racked up millions of pounds in losses because managers went through it faster than Norman Wisdom in a revolving door, and a new management team decided that the workers should pay the price of earlier mismanagement.

The workers wouldn’t have it. They balloted, as the law requires, and some of them went on strike, though for only six days. So they, and their union, must be punished.

I have nothing but the most thoroughgoing contempt for the Graham Briggses [director of human resources] of this world – overpaid, over-mighty and over-sure of themselves, buttressed in power and authority by the Tory NHS “reforms”.

Mr O’Malley and Ms Thompson are the real champions of our NHS, not the bosses who pretend to run it.”


Hear, hear!

The Socialist Party calls on the trade unions to take the lead on a national campaign to defend our NHS, including building for a national demo to focus the defence of the health service and a 24-hour general strike to stop the government’s destructive agenda.