[OccupyComms] 10th of may-strike with St thomas NHS staff

Fri May 4 18:04:03 GMT 2012

Hi All

Please come and join us at St Thomas hospital for a demo, march and rally  on the 10th of May.

The Guy's & St Thomas' branch of Unite is rapidly becoming one of the most important union branches in the country. It's almost certainly the largest Unite health branch and over the last year or so has proved to be one of the most dynamic at both a local and national level

we've prepared the following "press statement" for May 10 which will be circulated to as many media outlets as we can, in addition to being spread using all forms of social media
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On May 10 Unite will be calling its NHS members out on strike.  The strike is the next step in the dispute over the government's attack on the NHS pensions.  The scheme is totally viable in its current form and the reason for changing the scheme is to pay for the economic crisis left by the bankers.  All NHS staff will have to work longer, pay more and will get less once they retire due to the vulgar excesses of capitalism.

Though we are striking over pensions we should not forget that a cut-price pension would make NHS services far more attractive to giant private healthcare providers. Now that the Lansley Bill has been passed, resisting an awful deal on pensions is one way to help fight off predatory corporate vultures intent on cherry-picking profitable bits of the NHS to line the pockets of their shareholders.

Unite at Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust will be picketing outside St Thomas' Hospital and later holding a short rally before marching across Westminster Bridge to join up with colleagues at Central Hall. We'll be joined on May 10 by friends from KONP and other bodies who are opposed to the decimation of the NHS. We're already seeing privatisation of a range of services at Guy's & St Thomas': Sainsbury taking over the dispensing pharmacy at St Thomas'; a post room run by DHL; pathology run as a joint venture by Serco; it's worrying that Capital, Estates and Facilities have now paid £15000 to be re-branded as "Essentia".

The attacks on NHS worker terms and conditions are another way of opening the NHS for privatisation. This includes the proposed policy of moving away from national pay bargaining and things like the new punitive sickness policy which makes it easier to discipline and sack staff who have genuine medical conditions.

These attacks on the NHS and NHS staff should not be treated as individual threats. They are part of a strategy that allows for the destruction of the NHS and was being planned before the Conservatives took office in 2010. The attacks on public sector pensions in general are symptomatic of the dogmatic belief that "public is bad, private is good" and that we should allow unregulated market forces to create wealth. The greed of the 1% most wealthy caused a global economic downturn and discredited the capitalist system. No one in the public sector is deliberately profligate. The vast majority of public sector workers are low paid and to suggest that employees in the private sector are less well paid and have to pay for their own pensions is wilfully misleading. This is not a race to the bottom, it's about fair pensions for all.

We'll also be joined by members of the PCS and UCU, unions that have consistently rejected the derisory pensions offer, in a display of solidarity that we believe will show other public sector unions that the pensions fight is far from over, and that it's a fight that we can win.

We welcome support from anyone or any organisation that may not be on strike. We'd like you to join with us for as much time as you can spare on May 10.

Protect public sector pensions. Protect our NHS

Timetable

11 am Rally on Westminster Bridge Road with open mic

12 noon Assemble for march across Westminster Bridge to join rally at Westminster Central Hall

1 pm Central London Rally at Central Hall, Westminster

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The government is incredibly unpopular at the moment, reeling from the News Corp phone hacking scandal and Jeremy Hunt desperately clinging on to his job, Home Office blunders over queues at Heathrow and over the release of alleged terrorists, not to mention their rather poor record with the economy following on from the most political budget ever where they supported tax breaks for the super-rich and clobbered low- and middle income earners. We're in the middle of a pay freeze and that's going to be followed by a pay cap. If you checked your pay packet you'll have already seen that your pension contribution has gone up

This is a fight we can win. Robbing our pension pot to pay the bankers is bonkers. Let's get out there and show them that we won't let them make us work longer, pay more for our pensions and get less in return

See you on May 10

Aileen Scott-mcfarlane

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