Hospital claim by subsistence level workers

LIKE COUNCIL workers, 260,000 Health Service ancillary workers are planning strike action over their £2 15s wage demand.

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I would like to subscribe to Workers Press for The employers' offer of up to fl 16s a week for men and fl 12s for women is completely contemptible at a time of rocketing prices and rents.

Hospital workers' pay has remained at subsistence level for years and even the current claim will only raise the minimum basic wage to f16 10s.

The National Health ancillary workers carry out variety of tasks essential to the running of hospitals, clinics, etc.

These include catering, laundering, portering, ambulance work, driving and all manner of cleaning operations -often very unpleasant work. inSome ations require Vitolarn prised by the number of S Africans who were opposed to apartheid and were trying to 'moderate its brutalities'. special, skills, like making surgical shoes.

But even work classed unskilled may require special qualities.

For example, porters have to lift and carry patients who may be in any stage of an illness or collapse, transferring them from chairs or beds to stretcher trolleys to be moved to different departments.

In many cases immense difficulties are added to the work through the over-crowding of hospitals, while some of the older premises are built like stone barracks (many were previously workhouses) and the work is hard, heavy and dirty.

Nearly 75 per cent of the workers (192,000) are women. Half are classed as part-time, though a high percentage work more than 30 hours Low earnings A 1960 Prices and Incomes Board report admitted that earnings 'are among the lowest the country, but suggested a lls 8d rise (to £13 ls 7d basic) on the basis of work study in hospitals.

The breakdown of job demarcation and the use of job evaluation, interchangeability and flexibility of labour were all to be considered.

The PIB target was:

'A productivity increment equivalent to 10 per cent of basic wage rates payable on achievement of a 10 per cent reduction in total labour costs.' • The National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) claimed the Report a victory for its policies and actually evolved a scheme to penalize hospital authorities who did not introduce productivity deals fast enough.

Breaking service

The Tories are already considering major increases in National Health payments and are preparing to take measures to break up the National Health as a public service.

For the hospital workers unity on the present claim with the council workers is This must include the demand for equal pay for women, also total opposition to 'productivity' job cutting and speed-up is needed.

But to defend the public services and workers' hard-won rights it is necessary to defeat the Tories' political plans to attack the working class.

National Health workers should elect delegates immediately to the October 3 conference organized by the All Trades Unions Alliance on the Pilkington struggle as being a major step towards taking up the fight against the Tories and their policies.