Vol. 77/No. 37      October 21, 2013

The government is moving ahead with its decision to close 10 percent of emergency departments and maternity wards and 6 percent of pediatric units. There are 6,000 fewer nurses now than three years ago.

The cuts take place in the context of assaults on workers’ unions, wages and jobless benefits. While official unemployment stands at 7.7 percent, the impact of the world crisis on jobs is manifest in a record high number forced into part-time work and an explosion in “casual” work through employment agencies. Officially, real wages dropped an average of nearly 3 percent annually between 2010 and 2012.

Labour Party leaders and their backers in the union officialdom used the action to paint Labour as defenders of the National Health Service. The opposition party held the government for 13 years until the most recent parliamentary elections in 2010, when it was taken by the Conservative (Tory) Party in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

Organized by the Trades Union Congress labor federation, the march drew health workers and other trade unionists, groups campaigning against cuts at hospitals and students.

Labour Party health spokesperson Andy Burnham told demonstrators that if elected, Labour would repeal the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, which expands competition from private health companies and puts local doctors in charge of budgets in their area. These changes are designed to make cost a weighty factor in medical decisions and weaken national wage scales and bargaining for health workers. In a process that began in the early 1990s, under both Conservative and Labour governments, NHS hospitals became self-financing and increasingly reliant on private investment.

“Last October we were given 90 days notice, dismissed and then re-employed with a new company, Future Directions,” said Andy Taylor, one of five dozen striking care workers for the disabled from Rochdale who took part in the demonstration.

“Our pay was cut 20 percent, sick pay and overtime rate ended and holiday entitlement halved,” said his co-worker Karen Astin.

The day before several thousand marched to protest cuts to maternity and pediatric units at Stafford Hospital. “Two thousand women give birth every year at Stafford,” said Anne Hobbs, a Stafford Labour councilor and health care worker. “They would be forced to travel out of town.”

Continuing an “efficiency savings” program of cuts initiated under the Labour government, the current Tory-Liberal coalition aims to cut £20 billion ($32 billion) by 2015, including through a wage freeze on health care workers.

Twenty-nine members of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union from the Hovis bakery in Wigan took part in the protest, following strikes against moves to replace part of the workforce there with temporary workers.

The day after the demonstration, the Conservative Party announced that the long-term unemployed will have to work for no pay or face losing their benefits — a measure that is part of a campaign to scapegoat workers without jobs, undermine solidarity and increase competition among workers.  
 
 
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