Why we should listen to the cleaners on strike at the Maudsley hospital

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/21/maudsley-hospital-strike-women

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Leaving the house at 6am and heading to the Maudsley hospital in Camberwell, south London, to set up the picket line for today’s strike of cleaners and domestic staff, my anxiety was rising. Had we done enough? Would the workers have been persuaded by management to change their minds at the last minute and break the strike? Would it just be me on the picket line with a few GMB flags?

I needn’t have worried because by 7.30am more than 40 GMB union members had joined the picket. Waving their flags, chanting, shouting, laughing. Empowering each other, willing each other on with one simple goal – to win.

Because today is all about power, or more to the point who has the power. These wonderful, inspiring, strong women, predominantly black and minority ethnic, who come to work every day for a multibillion-dollar American multinational corporation called Aramark, are paid a poverty wage. They are told which wards to work on, where to go and what to do. On a daily basis at work, it is not these women that have the power.

Throughout British history, women have fought for and won change, from the Ford Dagenham strikers to the E15 mums

But the balance has shifted. The sense of power that these women – indeed all of us – experienced on the picket line is tangible. The scales have tipped in favour of the workers. All because they have organised into a union, the GMB. They have grown in confidence, their consciousness has been raised, their heads are high, and they have done the most powerful thing a group of organised workers can do: they have withdrawn their labour. They have redressed the balance of power between them and their employer.

In fact it is turning into a David v Goliath dispute. The women are cleaners and domestic workers across the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust, some earning as little as £7.38 per hour and receiving only 10 days’ sick pay after their first year of service (which only applies after the first three days of illness).

In the week after a budget that attacked the most vulnerable while benefiting the wealthy, the struggle of these women is one that we all need to pay attention to. Not because what they face to make ends meet make us feel sad, or because in one of the richest cities in the world the exploitation of working people is something very real indeed. No, we need to pay attention to these women because they are showing us what can be done to stop these injustices. To change our society. They are sending hope to other workers that there is a way of taking their power back, it’s called organising.

Throughout British history, women have fought for and won change, from the Ford Dagenham strikers to the E15 mums. In an economy where women are still disproportionately affected by low pay, the work they traditionally do is seen as an extension of unpaid labour carried out in the home. Where women workers – particularly migrant and BME women – are often forced into precarious work with little protection or rights, it is essential that women now lead the charge against this oppression. The Aramark women are showing us how it’s done.

They are striking to improve their lives and their families’ lives. But they are also striking against an ideology that has seen so much of our public sector privatised. Thirty years ago these women would have been employed by the NHS on NHS terms and conditions negotiated by trade unions. Today they are left to the mercy of the market, where multinational corporations circle our NHS like vultures, waiting to make a profit by driving down wages and terms and conditions.

Aramark relies on the justification that it pays the workers competitive rates in line with the market and claims it has made a fair and comprehensive offer. Since when did we allow someone’s standard of living to be dictated by the market.

If ever there was a time to take a stand against this line of argument it is now. One of the GMB representatives put it better than I ever could: “If the doctors can do it, then so can we.” And they are doing it. Today these women won, even if only for 24 hours. But I have no doubt that after today their determination and solidarity will drive them on to win something that every worker should be entitled to: a wage they can live on and a sick pay scheme that doesn’t force them into poverty every time they are ill.

The struggle of these women is a struggle for all of us that want a fairer society.