Rob Pettefar, Swindon Socialist Party
A second strike took place on 11 and 12 November at Swindon’s Great Western Hospital (GWH) in an ongoing dispute over pay, conditions, and the Covid bonus that was paid out to most hospital staff.
The strikers are bolder and more determined than ever, with the GMB union joining Unison for combined action. The striking workers are porters, housekeeping, catering and security staff.
Workers who keep the hospital functioning – and who worked gruelling hours during Covid with inadequate protection – have been underappreciated by management, withholding both pay rises and the Covid bonus, and bullying and harassment of staff.
Serco, with projected profits of £270 million this year, runs these services on an outsourcing contract. It has been estimated that the whole dispute would take £25,000 to resolve!
GWH was the first hospital built using Tony Blair’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI).
Talking to workers on the picket, it became clear that the management of GWH are not above retaliation or bribery to discourage striking workers. We were told that plenty of overtime was offered to workers willing to cross the picket line, while being revoked for up to three weeks from those who participated in the strike. Serco moved workers in from other sites to cover those shifts too.
One striker told me how she and one other housekeeper were given eight hours to clean two entire departments. When one of them was signed off long-term sick, the remaining housekeeper had to do the same two departments in the same eight hours!
The union rep that the housekeeping staff relied on to challenge management was dismissed last year. It’s suspected that this was because he stuck up for the workers. Now they say they are too scared to come forward to take up the role of union rep, in case it happens to them. Since his departure there have been around 16 lay-offs, with short notice, for minor rule infractions.
We in the Socialist Party stand with these health workers. The privatised contracts in the NHS need to be ended and work brought back in-house. The experiment with privatisation has clearly failed. The NHS should be fully publicly owned and democratically run, so that workers are respected and paid well, and patients’ needs come before the business interests of the large contracting companies that suck the lifeblood out of our health service like ticks.
