We publish here a letter from one of our regular readers, who describes the story of a female worker in the NHS and the horrific experiences she has had to endure as a result of privatisation and the pursuit of profit inside the health service. Her story is all too likely to be similar to those of many other workers in those services that have been privatised and outsourced.
We publish here a letter from one of our regular readers, who describes the story of a female worker in the NHS and the horrific experiences she has had to endure as a result of privatisation and the pursuit of profit inside the health service. Her story is all too likely to be similar to those of many other workers in those services that have been privatised and outsourced.
This week in a surgery in the Midlands, a doctor saw a 38-year-old Indian woman. Crying, at the end of her tether, she was asking for a sick note.
Like so many other public sector workers, she has found herself employed by one of the predatory facilities and estates companies so ready to feast off the public purse and take profit out of the NHS.
A cleaner on less than £8 per hour, she has to work three part time jobs to make ends meet. When she was TUPE‘d into the private company, she expressed a need, due to childcare responsibilities, to continue her 22 hours per week, on weekdays only. She accepted the need to move to one of the Trust’s other sites in order to do this, as if she were to stay at her original workplace she could only be offered 9 hours at weekends.
Her letter confirming her hours did not arrive until a week after the new changes and it stated she was employed for nine hours per week. When she tried to see a manager to get it sorted out, she was told by her supervisor that she would have to make an appointment. She kept on putting in requests for an appointment and hearing nothing. Eventually she chanced on her manager in the corridor and explained the situation. Shortly afterwards she got her letter confirming that she was employed for 22 hours per week, soon followed by her first wage slip and payment for… nine hours per week.
Desperate, as she needed the money to pay her mortgage, she took her latest wage slip with her previous two wage slips for comparison to her supervisor, asking her to give it to her manager to sort it out. Since then, she has had her second monthly pay… for nine hours per week, and one of her wage slips has now been lost.
In tears she described how she had to go and borrow money from her mother to pay the mortgage. In addition she related how, under the new regime, supplies and equipment are in short supply and she has had to go round the hospital to get the things she needs to do her job, only to be asked in a bullying tone ‘What are you doing here? You can’t come here to get supplies’.
‘Doctor!’ she said, choking back the tears, embarrassed at crying in front of her daughter and the GP, ‘They treat us like animals. I am hard worker. I clean from the heart. I work 20 years here. Why they do this to me?’
With little else at his disposal the GP gave her a sick note for work related stress, advised her that her employer had broken the law and to go and join the union and enlist their support to get her rightful pay and take up her grievances.
We must fight for Labour to win the next election on a socialist programme to take back public ownership of these services, to give workers back their dignity, and stop the bullying and thieving that maintains this rotten capitalist system.
