Matt Prior (porter at Colchester Hospital and Unison Rep) and Caroline Lenoury (healthcare assistant and Unite member) report on the strike at the East Sussex and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust

Who’d have thought that from the initial ‘leak’ about us potentially being privatised just six months ago, we’d be here?

Hundreds of NHS frontline staff, shocked and angered at the news, rose to the occasion and immediately set the wheels in motion to take collective action against ESNEFT’s senior management. From an NHS workplace where there was essentially zero visible union presence, to a branch with now 2,600 members strong, because of this plan to send ‘soft facilities’ (porters, cleaners, caterers, help desk, security and general office) back into private-sector hands. Unison was the only union to show any interest in supporting industrial action on our hospital’s grounds with both our dispute as well as the Health Care Assistants’ backpay fight, and they have now gained over 1,000 new members in our Trust.

Unwittingly, ESNEFT’s Chief Exec Nick Hulme has single-handedly unionised hundreds of my colleagues who, for a variety of reasons, were apathetic about joining a union. After now two rounds of strike action, it has changed the way we think of ourselves and each other. We now talk to colleagues we had never spoken to before in many years of walking past each other in corridors. We feel the strength of our unity and our solidarity in this fight. We talk about how this is a good thing that’s come out of this no matter what happens next.

It’s given people a voice to stand up for themselves, the patients they care for, and the NHS as a whole. A voice that the Trust has to listen to, just by the sheer strength of numbers we have, both physically on our very vocal picket lines, and through every one of us who isn’t on shift, giving the Trust a headache trying to cover for hundreds of essential staff (they’ve covered, badly, by shipping people in from the other side of the country on inflated pay rates).

Action transforms

Our voice felt like it had always been ignored, forgotten or just deemed not important enough by those up top, simply because we represent the lowest-paid workers in the Trust. But if hundreds of staff were so quick in deciding to take strike action, very often for the first time in their life, it is because people are proud to have the NHS badge on their uniforms. They do these jobs because they want to help people in whatever way possible that their role allows. Not because it’s well-paid. It certainly isn’t, as every one of us isn’t even a penny above minimum wage.

To get any more than that, you have to work the most unsociable hours going. This means precious time away from families, loved ones and friends just to get a semblance of a liveable wage. But the NHS as an institution means so much to people. It has been there for generations to care for us and our families in our hours of need. This is why we are proud to work for the NHS and we will keep fighting, whatever it takes.

At Colchester hospital, having been part of Carillion Health’s portfolio, we were brought back into the NHS in the winter of 2012. Those staff that remain from being privatised before, as well as hundreds of other colleagues, have no intention of caving in. Because if we do, we know it’s back to the dark old days of running on skeleton staff and making cuts every which way they can, to turn a profit for the shareholders. In turn, making the patient experience in our Trust worse, and screwing the taxpayer over yet again.

It is up to us working-class people to fight for a well-funded and publicly owned NHS, because it is us who will suffer the most when services keep degrading. People who can afford to pay will always be able to get timely and good quality care. They already do. So to avoid going further down the road of a two-tier system, we need to come together across unions and across sectors and fight for the future of our NHS. Restoring the NHS, to what it was designed to be, should be a whole trade-union movement issue.

What happens here, at Colchester hospital and across ESNEFT’s community sites in Suffolk, could shape the future of the NHS for the next five years under this new Labour government. So please do whatever you can to support us. Send us your solidarity, raise the issue of our dispute and of the NHS in your communities, in your union branches, regardless of where you live or work!

To support the strikers, sign the UNISON petition, donate to the strike fund, or write to your MP here.