London: Hundreds of cleaners have forced world famous Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children to end outsourcing and instead make them permanent NHS staff. These cleaners, almost all of whom are migrant workers, balloted for strike action, but were in-housed before that action was necessary. Finnian Clarke from the Justice Gap reports on the latest victory in the battle against outsourcing.
The cleaners were employed by outsourcing giant OCS on a £10 million a year contract. At the outset of the pandemic, they joined the trade union United Voices of the World (UVW) in order to tackle what they saw as institutional racism that they experienced at Great Ormond Street in terms of inferior pay and conditions compared to in-housed NHS staff. For example, despite working at a hospital, cleaners were only given statutory sick pay of about £19 a day rather than the NHS’ full pay sick pay rates.
The workers unanimously voted in favour of strike action, and UVW also threatened legal action on the basis that the outsourcing policy indirectly discriminated on the grounds of race, and that the hospital had never undertaken an Equality Impact Assessment of their policy. After a 45-page document was presented to Great Ormond Street on the harms that the outsourcing policy was having, the Board announced that the workers would be in-housed in the coming months.
Read more: Finnian Clarke, Justice Gap, https://is.gd/ZuTkzO
