COHSE North West Banner July 1982

COHSE North West Banner 10th July 1982 TUC Rally, Manchester

John Smith (IFL)  

Miners Support NHS Workers 1982

COHSE nurses march with South Wales Miners in Cardiff 16th June 1982

33 South Wales went on strike in support of NHS workers 12% pay claim

On June 8th 50,000 on strike to support NHS workers in solidarity in Midlands and Yorkshire

Scottish miners strike in solidarity 23 June 1982



June NHS pay marches in Birmingham 3,000, 3,000 in Bristol, 700 i Leicester, 400 Wolverhampton, 500 Hackney, 500 Islington, Dundee, Paisley, Carlisle, Liverpool, West Yorkshire, Middlesborough, Nottingham, Aylesbury, Newry, Derry


Many miners went on strike again on the National TUC Day of Action for NHS Pay on 22 September 1982

COHSE - St Mary's Hospital 1982

Bangour Hospital Nurses on Strike April 1982

Jim Devine Branch Secretary at Banour Hospital, Scotland built up a formidable progressive COHSE branch at the Hospital, along with the Branch Chairman "Tam"

In 1980 the branch set up a well produced printed newsletter after purchasing a professional printing press "Bangour Free Press"

Jim later became a charismatic and energetic COHSE regional officer becoming the undisputed champion of NHS staff in Scotland and later still a Labour MP. 



Bangour Hospital Closed in 1989



COHSE Bangour Hospital banner 1980




COHSE Bangour branch banner at Cheltenham GCHQ Demo 1988

1982 NHS Pay Campaign - 22nd September Demonstration

Nurses 1982

UK Nurses in action during the 1982 12% pay Campaign

Royal Surrey COHSE Student Nurses 1982

12% Campaign - Coventry Hospitals Bike Ride 1982

1982 Coventry - London 12% campaign Bike Ride

By JIM SAUNDERS
August 1982

health workers are biking to downing street as part of the action week, starting today fourty Coventry health service workers will carry their protest against the government's pay policy by bike to London.

They will leave Coventry today, calling en route at Banbury, Oxford, Hillingdon and arrive in Central London midday Friday.

Among the bike's are six tandems. The riders include nurses, ancillary and maintenance wor-
kers as well as professional and technical- staff drawn from Coventry's hospitals.

They will deliver a petition to No. 10 Downing Street and present a bill for £325,000 to Health Minister Norman Fowler.

This is the amount the Coventry District Health Authority would have rto find to meet the government's health service wage formula. It has already overspent on its budget.

"The truth is," says Lloyd Randall, secretary of the NUPE hospitals branch in the city,
"there is not a 6 per cent offer.

It is just 4 per cent and an offer to cannibalise the service to meet the other 2 per cent."

PICKET LINES

In addition to being divisive. the Tory government tactics will also mean the loss of up to 80
jobs in the city's hospitals.

The bikers will link up with local health service co-ordinating committees on their journey.
They are offerins to join picket lines at hospitals and speak at meetings. But they also hope
that other trade unionists will turn out in force to greet them.

They will be joined in London bv strikers whose seven week action has reduced the central sterile supplies depot to emergency only.

Nurses at the outpatients department oi the Coventry and Warwick Hospital, as well as
maintenance and boilerhouse workers in Walsgrave and other hospitals also plan to impose
sanctions in the coming week.

A meeting in Birmingham ot local health service union co- ordinating committees support-
ed calls from Coventry for the TUC to sharpen up the action on health service pay.

AN ULTIMATUM

A resolution adopted "calls on the TUC health service committee to support a call for an ultimatum for an all-out strike from September 1 by all TUC health service unions, if an im-
proved offer is not made or if the dispute is not referred to arbitration."

Another resolution urges the TUC not to accept any offer which is not fully funded by central government. To do so, it says, would mean accepting cuts in the service.

There is; also a strong feeling that local co-ordinating committees should have more discretion over implementing accident and emergency cover. The TUC's code of conduct is seen as being so wide as to be ineffective in some areas.

There is a call for a review and a tightening up of the TUC's emergency cover procdures.

Britannia Hospital (1982)

Britannia Hospital
Film Review
by TONY VENTHAM COHSE Shop Steward, Willesden Ambulance Station, London Ambulance Service

Britannia hospital, the new film from Lindsay Anderson who made "If", is a satirical attack on the society of the 1980s.

It is set in a decaying hospital which is due to receive a royal visit. Outside is a picket of hospital workers, shown by the film as completely callous.

Inside the star attraction is a research centre, in which a mad professor is attempting, Frankenstein like, to build a new human being. When the royal visit finally takes place, the mob outside erupts, the Special patrol group (Riot Police) are brought in and everything seems set for a violent final scene as in "if" But the battle between the classes is suddenly ended by the intervention of the professor.


He Invites the demonstrators to sit beside royalty In his lecture theatre. In a brilliant speech he outlines the way in which capitalist society is falling apart and presents his new human being as the solution.

The film leaves you with a mixture of emotions, more quest ions than answers, wondering how much of it was serious and how much a wind up.

The film echoes the demoralisation and increasing bitterness of Thatcher's Britain. Poverty Is contrasted with the wealth of the professor's research centre, funded by a Japanese pharmaceutical company.

The media are characterised by an investigative reporting team who get stoned on magic mushrooms while watching in awe and wild laughter scenes from Vietnam and the Brixton riots. The bourgeoisie are portrayed by the hospital administrator, who becomes increasingly desperate and, in the end, is prepared to kill to protect what he holds dear. The outcome is unclear.

Does the new technology of the research centre reconcile the class antagonism? Or does It merely make the dream of a socialist future practical? Anderson was one of the Angry Young Men of the British cinema in the mid 1950s, sparking a revolution akin to that of John Osborne, George Devine and others in the theatre.

Has he now become as bitter and twisted as Osborne? Or is he, as puts it, simply 'a satirist' and a 'frustrated romantic'? The fact that the film has been hyped to the hilt by EMI and pushed on to general release with almost frantic haste begs a question. Is it a coincidence that a film showing hospital pickets as inhuman and animal-like should be promoted in the middle of the NHS pay dispute?

You must decide if it is worth seeing.

NOTE


Britannia Hospital, was a viciously anti union film as Anderson has had admitted.

The Film is actually based upon events during the anti private patient campaign at Hammersmith hospital and Charring Cross and the respective NUPE and COHSE branch Secretaries (Jamie Fleming and Ester Brookstone) .

The truth was that low paid ancillary staff in these teaching hospitals had been treated as the lowest of the low by the Consultants and medical staff for years, by the late 1970's they had had enough and hitting the Consultants private patients was one way of getting back at them and securing some dignity (as well as making a point about equal access to health care).

The Hospital Consultants fought any attack on their lucrative private work with all the power they could muster, and smashed those involved in the anti private patients campaign, by lobbying at the highest government levels and regular denouncing the unions in the right wing press, There actions would ultimately lead to the contracting out (privatisation) of many ancillary services 1980s (and the filthy wards we have today)

Tony Ventham was then the acceptable face of the SWP in COHSE and generally well respected, but probably like the rest of us underestimated the anti union message of this film. Tony later became a lawyer.

Islands in the Sun 1982

Islands in the Sun

Outside Royal Surrey County Hospital (RSCH) permanent COHSE picket during the 1982 pay campaign.

The island later acquired a Palm tree and the 10mph sign became 12%

Co-ordinated by Carles, Lesley, Graham and Michael

Fleet Street Solidarity Strike 1982

Full COHSE support for Sean Geraghty

Full Confederation of Health Service Employees (COHSE The health care union)) backing has been pledged to electricians' leader Sean Geraghty who faces a fine and heavy legal costs after his members held up the Fleet Street printing presses on 11^th August 1982 in support of the NHS pay campaign during the 9-13th protest week of action.

Sean Geraghty, secretary of the London Press Branch of the Electricians Union (ETU), was fined £350 for contempt of court and ordered to pay court costs after his 1,300 members disobeyed an injunction obtained by the Newspaper Publishers' Association (NPA) to stop the threatened twenty-four hour strike on 11 August. 1982.

COHSE has offered to pay the fine and contribute towards the costs, expected to be a massive £10,000, incurred after a court appearance lasting only a few minutes.

The NPA brought the case against Mr Sean Geraghty for breaching the injunction. Under the 1980 Employment Act, the courts could have sent him to jail and he still faces prison if he fails to pay the fine by October. The electricians' branch has yet to decide whether the fine should be met.

Hundreds of NHS workers marched from St Bartholomew's Hospital in London to the High Court in New Fetter Lane on 13 August 1982, the day of the hearing.COHSE members from Regions 5, 6, and 8 were well represented both outside the court and at the Department of Health & Social Security’s London headquarters at the Elephant and Castle, where demonstrators joined the vigil organised by London health staff for the week long protest.

Although COHSE initially expressed concern that the Fleet Street action would distract publicity from the health staffs' case, COHSE General Secretary Albert Spanswick described the electricians' stoppaqe as a wonderful gesture of solidarity' and warned at serious action' would result if Mr Geraghty was imprisoned

Photo

Sean Geraghty addressing supporters outside the New Fetter Lane High Court;

NOTE:
The threat under new anti trade union laws to jail Sean Geraghty, led to a surge of support for the campaign. Unquestionably, had he been jailed, the industrial action in response would have significant from the unions.

The diminutive, softly spoken, 46 year old Irish man. Sean Geraghty, who worked at the Daily Mirror became a household name, celebrity and working class hero overnight.

However, the Tories anti trade union Law had been especially drafted to ensure that their could be no Martyrs, for the movement to organise around.

The right wing Electricians Union were also not happy with this act of solidarity and tried to break up the branch ad discipline Geraghty.

Guildford COHSE 1982

National Demonstration, London 22nd September 1982 COHSE Guildford & District 1333

COHSE Strike Plan 1982

The COHSE NEC Action Plan

The Action Committee set up by COHSE's National Executive Committee met on 13 April 1982 and drew up a comprehensive range of recommendations for industrial action to be taken up by branches.

The two main forms to be applied within the COHSE guidelines on the protection of patient care and maintenance of emergency services are:

•ban on all non-emergency admissions;

• selective two hour withdrawals of Labour.

A further list was also set out, again within COHSE's Code of Conduct and within the 1979 Joint Agreement on Emergency Services. The proposals, as well as the emergency services agreement, are listed in Head Office Circular 235/82.

Designed to cause the greatest administrative inconvenience to management and least harm to patients, they include:

• ban on private patients' services;

• non co-operation with private contractors;

•refusal by nurses to carry out non-nursing duties, as well as by non-nurses to carry out nursing duties;

•ban on the cleaning of non-clinical areas;

•reduction of output of hospital laundries;

•holding of local demonstrations;

Isle of Man Nurses Strike (1982)

The Island’s nurses in revolt take historic action (1982)

Mike Pentelow (Morning Star) reports on the Victorian-style conditions of hospital nurses on the Isle of Man.

The nurses are taking action in common with their colleagues on mainland Britain

NURSES on the Isle of Man made history yesterday, becoming the first workers there since the general strike of 1926 to take industrial action simultaneously with their colleagues in Britain.

It is a sign of growing dissatisfaction with working conditions and antiquated attitudes to unions by the extremely right wing government, said COHSE

branch secretary Albert Kelly.

The nurses have imposed an indefinite ban from yesterday on non-nursing duties they have to do, which are normally done in Britain by plotters, laundry staff, cleaners and telephonists.

These tasks leave less time for patient care duties, said Mr.

Kelly. Coupled with a refusal to consult staff before introducing changes, the duties have led to the increased militancy.

Membership of the union on the island has soared in the last 18 months from just 25 to 500 out of a potential 1,000 and is still growing. The government has reacted by singling out COHSE from other unions to stop deducting their contributions from wages.

Chairman of the islands Health Services Board, Albert Callin, tried to stave off the action by pressurising nurses with letters sent direct to them individually asking them to continue normal working.

"Any action which affects the duties an employee has been engaged to perform," he wrote, must affect the "standard of care able to be given to patients." of the disabled and there were two disabled telephonists on the unemployment register at the time. But management refused to employ them, saying it could not afford it.

"This really illustrates the attitude of the extremely right-wing government," said Mr. Kelly. It can easily afford to employ them as the difference between the disability grant that they were paying anyway and wages would not have been great.

Another bone of contention is making nurses responsible for checking the reasons why burglar or fire alarms go off rather than employing security staff to do it.

This means nurses at night especially may face the invidious choice of attending medical or non-medical emergencies.

"We want the Health Services Board to have a policy of consultation and negotiations with the union," said Mr. Kelly.

At present they have to fight bitter battles for basic rights such as cooked meals facilities for nurses on the night shift who have to work from 8pm to 7am.

Perhaps the worst exploitation. however, occurs in the private nursing homes for old people which have sprung up because of the aging population. This has brought pressure on geriatric wards in the hospitals.

These homes often have charitable status yet charge patients £80 a week or more while paying staff on nursing duties as little as £40 to £50 a week.

The nurses are not allowed to join the union normally and there is no extra t>ay for week-end work. In, one case night work was paid with an extra l0p a week.

"One of the problems with the Isle of Man is that employers for years have been able to dictate terms," said Mr. Kelly.

Typical of this he added, was the government's refusal to accept any laws on employment protection, equal pay or sex discrimination.

He hoped British unions, many of whom hold their conferences on the island, would take a greater interest in its workers.

NOTE
COHSE later refused to hold it's conference on the Isle of Man because of its stance on equality issues (unlike NALGO), placing the COHSE branch undre great internal pressure, however it remained loyal throughout

1982 Rcn leaflet attacking COHSE & NUPE

RCN Nurses Pay – the Facts (1982)

THE CHOICE IS YOURS

Some thoughts to consider when reading COHSE/NUPE propaganda COHSE and NUPE do not believe that nurses' pay should be a 'special case'. The Rcn emphatically does. As a nurse, do you?

"The Rcn is doing nothing to help nurses get better pay. "

The increase of 1.1 per cent on the 6.4 per cent offer is totally inadequate, but had the Rcn's first ballot not demonstrated to a surprised Government the strength of feeling among Rcn members, it is unlikely that nurses would have been offered any more at all. Has industrial action yet resulted in any increased offer?

"The Rcn is being divisive in wanting more money for nurses than for other equally deserving health workers, and hasn't supported the TUC's campaign for better wages for all health service workers. "

The Rcn is under no illusion about the shamefully low levels of pay currently earned by many different groups of workers in the NHS, workers on whom the smooth running of the NHS depends no less than on doctors and nurses. But the Rcn exists to promote the interests of nurses, and believes that nurses are

special, as should the Nurses and Midwives Whitley Council. Isn't it about time that all the organisationson the Staff Side of the Nurses and Midwives Whitley Council woke up to this fact?

"The Rcn doesn't strike, but rides on the backs of other unions which are taking positive action”

This Government seems determined, as few administrations have been before, to show that industrial action, whether undertaken by civil servants, railwaymen or health service workers, does not succeed. Rightly or wrongly, this fact cannot be ignored. The problem of the present pay round will not disappear. Sooner or later negotiations on the 1982 pay claim will have to recontinue and the Rcn says 'the sooner the better'.

"The Rcn is not worried about this year's pay talks but is pinning its hopes on a new mechanism for the future."

Because the other organisations are not exclusively committed to promoting nurses' interests, they have delayed, and continue to delay, talks to find a permanent solution to the problem of nurses' pay. The police and the fire service have successfully negotiated pay formulas that safeguard their pay in relation to

annual pay movements generally. The Government has now committed itself to do the same for nurses by next April. Do you want to sacrifice this opportunity by allying yourself with organisations who have no special interest in nurses?

"The Rcn only represents senior staff. "

60,000 students would disagree and there are certainly not 135,000 nurse managers! The Rcn represents all trained nurses and nurses in training with equal enthusiasm. It is the one professional organisation and trade union for all nurses.

"Nurses are leaving the Rcn in droves. "

Not true. The Rcn is continuing to receive a steady stream of applications from nurses who recognise that a nursing organisation is the only one qualified to look after their interests.

Finally, the Rcn lets its members decide. Would COHSE or NUPE dare to ballot their nurse members on the present offer?

1982 Conference M.Star report

1982 Conference Morning Star report

COHSE Conference 1982

Morning Star Report

By JIM ARNISON Bridlington

Overwhelming vote to step NHS fight

DELEGATES attending the COHSE conference here yesterday voted overwhelmingly to escalate the health service pay dispute, but rejected calls

for 'all-out strike action.

The national executive's committee's emergency resolution, calling for a stepping up of the fight for a 12 per cent pay increase, was carried with only

15 of the 600 delegates voting against.

There were however repeated calls in the debate for all - out strike action and Mrs. Thatcher will find no consolation whatever in the more alanced decision of

conference to continue and extend the action already, begun. The union's general secretary, Alert Spanswick, said that the Tory government was on the run

"I believe we have already won the hearts and minds, not only of our members, but also of people of this country."

Never before had there been such an overwhelming chorus of criticism of government policy from the press, from patients and from the public.

"Other working people and their unions have taken your cause to their hearts in the most magnificent display of trade union solidarity it has every been

my privilege to witness," he said. Mr. Spanswick expressed a special thanks "to all the miners, the steel workers, to dockers and the seamen and all those thousand's of other trade union members who joined us on the one-day strikes of June 4 and June 8 and who will be joining us again on June 23."

The executive's resolution calls for the pay campaign to continue with selective withdrawal of key groups of staff, designed to reduce the NHS to, an accident arid emergency service only by the end of June.

It also called for increased support from the (trade union movement, including industrial action by other trade unions and financial and organisational support.

TROOPS THREAT

Mr. Spanswick made it clear that should any members of the union be disciplined (or carrying out official industrial action there would be an all-out with-drawal of labour in the locality concerned. And that should either troops or volunteers be used to break official strike action locally, there would be all-out withdrawal in (he locality concerned. In thedebate.

Mike Murphy, Maidstone, said that selective strikes were ineffective. He said that both members and patients suffered by piecemeal action "let's make It quick, sharp and short. Let's go all out and get it over with."

Andrea Campbell, Hackney, said that after all the selective stoppages had taken place members were no closer now than at the start., "We have got to take all-out strike action. We accept the NEC's resolution, it is going . to be a long hard road and we are not going to get anywhere."

650 HOSPITALS

Bill Dunn, (Ambulance man) Hanwell branch, asked how long the union could hold out in the event of an all-out strike and urged delegates: "Don't play into Mrs. Thatcher's hands. "She would love to go to the Tory conference to say that she had broken the health service unions." He urged delegates to support the NEC resolution.

Mr. Spanswick made it clear that the union was serving notice that industrial action would continue until the government conceded the claim.

There were now about 650 hospitals working on the basis of accident and emergency admissions only, and a further 1,500 hospitals were affected by disruptive action. It was wrong to suggest that the present strategy and tactics would not bring success. "What we have to do now is to extend and develop the actions we are already taking."

Seafarers' pledge

A special mass meeting of South Wales seafarers from

Newport. Cardiff and Barry yesterday promised health workers "any support or action they require during the dispute." The resolution; will be put into action today when seafarers Join the picket join outside St. David's, Sully and Hamadryad Hospitals, and later join striking miners and health workers on a demonstration through the streets of Cardiff.