Unison members working in ancillary services at the East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust are on strike this week against outsourcing plans, reports Richard Allday

More than 100 strikers formed a lively show of strength on the first strike day of Unison’s ‘soft service’ members at Colchester General Hospital on Monday. The strike officially started at 7.30 and will continue all week.

The strikers were buoyed by the continuous hoots of car horns as visitors to the hospital showed their support. Several visitors came to the picket line, after visiting friends or family in the hospital, to pass on messages of support from the patients. Likewise, there was a continual flow of nursing staff coming out on their breaks to visit the pickets.

The strike is over the Hospital Trust’s plans to contract out all ancillary services (so kitchen staff, porters, cleaners etc.) to private contractors, and has clearly caught the management on the hop. Unison has more than tripled its membership in the Trust since they started to organise against the Trust’s plans, and more joined today.

Activists from the local trade-union movement came to show their support; the local Trades Council, Unite’s Community branch, and the postal workers’ union, the CWU, prominent among them. Unite’s Road Haulage (LE/7055) branch handed over a cheque for £200 as a mark of solidarity, to loud cheers from the strikers. On being thanked by the strikers, the 7055 Branch Secretary said, ‘I thank you for the applause, but I need to tell you that this cheque is our way of saying “Thank you” to you, for the work you do every day, and even more for the action you are taking now, to defend our NHS.’

There are pickets at the Ipswich General Hospital this week as well, which is part of the same Trust, and Unison members affected are also on strike at Harwich’s Captain Fyatt Memorial Hospital, and at Aldeburgh and Felixstowe, but those strikers are supporting the picket lines at Colchester and Ipswich.