Mrs Mops on Strike

By New Worker correspondent

Another group of workers, this time much less well paid, were also on strike this week. They are the caterers, cleaners and porters at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, west London, who are organised by the United Voices of the World (UVW), a street union which is not in the TUC.

The 200 workers are outsourced by Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust to French multinational Sodexo. Their demand that they become NHS employees has become the longest in the history of the NHS and is endorsed by the London Regional Council of the British Medical Association (BMA), the doctors’ trade union.

In addition to this week’s action they have already taken six days of strike action, with more planned for the second week of December and an indefinite strike commencing in January.

UVW organiser Petros Elia said: “This is the first time a group of outsourced works are striking to be brought in-house as NHS employees. We cannot allow for there to be a two-tiered racially divided workforce within the NHS, and we won’t stop striking until that is put to an end. If Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales can do away with outsourcing cleaners, caterers and porters in hospitals, then England can and should as well.”  Amongst their demands are the modest ones of getting vaccinations, improved separate-gender changing facilities, and even access to NHS staff canteens and common rooms.

 Fifty doctors at St. Mary’s have signed an open letter to the Imperial Trust CEO, Tim Orchard, calling on the Trust to meet the workers’ demands and make them direct employees. They say: “Workers employed by Sodexo feel undervalued, demotivated and unsupported and have been left with no option but to vote for industrial action,” adding that: “Sodexo must do more to give them a fairer deal and it is incumbent upon the Trust to help enforce this change.”

One necessarily anonymous striker said: “I work 55 hours a week just to cover my rent. This is my home; I spend more time here than in my house. Yet I am treated like a dog and made to feel like dirt.”

A sympathetic doctor has said that many are paid a mere £8.21 per hour (those below the age of 25, even less), when the London living wage is set at £10.55 per hour. To make matters worse, they are only entitled to the bare minimum statutory sick pay of £94.25 per week. As a result, many report coming in to work whilst ill because they cannot afford the financial penalty of taking a sick day.

The same doctor reports that a security worker at another hospital told him how she had disciplinary action taken against her after leaving her post on the night she became ill with acute appendicitis. Her tiny sick pay meant she was forced to return to a physically demanding job before she had fully recovered from the emergency surgery.

Cleaners Fight Back

By New Worker correspondent

Transport union RMT is stepping up its campaign to secure justice for cleaners working on London Underground (LU). The cleaners are employed by private contractors ABM, the New York-based facilities manager that has a turnover of $6.4 billion from its 140,000 employees. The cleaners have been fighting for parity with directly employed LU workers on a number of fronts including pensions, sick pay and travel. RMT argues that ABM cleaners are being discriminated against when compared with their colleagues. In particular it deplores the inaction of the Labour Mayor of London on the issue.

Speaking at the launch of a strike ballot that opened on Monday, RMT General Secretary Mick Cash said: “It is a disgrace that over two thousand staff who clean London Underground’s trains and stations are treated as second-class citizens in their own workplace. We intend to right that wrong. This large group of staff, employed by the contractors ABM, clean up the human waste, vomit and other detritus and are instrumental in keeping London moving. They do some of the dirtiest jobs round the clock right across the tube network, and without their rapid response and continuing efforts services would be seriously compromised. They should not be subject to this outrageous workplace discrimination. It’s about time Sadiq Khan and LU called their contractors to account. We are calling on Londoners to back their tube cleaners’ fight for justice and as the ballot gets underway we remain available for serious and genuine talks.”

When the five year contract was awarded in 2017 Transport for London piously said it would ensure that cleaners would receive the London Living Wage and would end sub-contracting. An ABM advertisement for one of these jobs seen on the same day as the ballot opened offered precisely that. A full-time night-shift 10pm–5:30am was at the London Living Wage of £10.55 per hour but made no mention of being pensionable.

Also in London, an almost identical strike is underway at St Mary’s Hospital, part of the Imperial College NHS Trust in Paddington, where Alexander Fleming discovered the properties of penicillin; this time organised by the non-TUC union United Voices of the World (UVW). Two hundred cleaners, porters and caterers held the first of a series of strikes on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. The outsourced workers are demanding better pay and working conditions from Sodexo, a French multinational that has many such contracts in Britain.

 The workers are paid an hourly rate of £8.21 and even less for those under 25-years-old. This is up to £10,000 less per year than staff of equivalent grade under the NHS Agenda for Change, so the even London Living Wage is a distant dream. Obviously the bosses cannot afford to pay it because profits slumped nine per cent to $745.8 million last year. Sodexo claims it has already agreed to pay the London living wage from April and remained open to “negotiation and arbitration”.

Because workers only have the bare minimum Statutory Sick Pay they have to work on wards when ill, sometimes with flu, because they cannot afford to take time off when sick. They are campaigning for better changing facilities as well as for an end to discrimination that bans outsourced staff using NHS canteens and staff-rooms. As an additional insult, workers are forced to change in mice-ridden, dimly lit and mixed-gender changing rooms located in the hospital’s basement. One striking cleaner said: “I work 55 hours a week just to cover my rent. St Mary’s is my home, I spend more time here than in my house. Yet I am treated like a dog and made to feel like dirt.”

Petros Elia, an organiser for the UVW street union, says: “Sodexo’s contract with Imperial allowed its former CEO, Michel Landel, to enjoy obscene executive pay totalling nearly a million pounds a year and annual bonuses of up to 200 per cent of his salary. Sodexo and St Mary’s can afford to pay our workers in line with NHS rates and we urge them to do so, otherwise the strikes will continue indefinitely.”

At the same time, UVW are fighting similar battles across London. At Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens and St James’s Park, the Royal Parks in central London, park attendants are going on strike at Halloween. Cleaners at the Channel 4 offices on Gray’s Inn Road will be also on strike.

In 2016, the now 3,000-strong union organised the largest cleaners strike in UK history and became the first trade union to force a UK university [the London School of Economics (LSE)] to bring the entirety of its outsourced cleaners in-house. It also organised one of the longest strikes in the history of the City of London, lasting 61 consecutive days. UVW also represents workers in the legal sector, charity sector, cultural sector, architectural sector and even sex workers. Let us hope the results in 2019 are the same as in 2016.