Unison Branch Report

Please note that I'm writing this in a personal capacity.

Well, yesterday was my first branch meeting for North Staffs Community Care Unison Branch. The branch is one of the largest in the midlands with over 3000 people on the books. I was very impressed with the turnout with around 25, the split was roughly 50/50 men to women.

First up on the agenda was the vote to see if I should be youth officer or not. I'm pleased to say the vote was passed unanimously in my favour, which seeing as I was the only person under 35 there it is not surprising.

Second- we had James, a representative from Lealta who was trying to sell the branch discount cards. Apparently Unison tried doing something similar for themselves a couple of years ago, but it fell through earlier this year. The card would offer at least a 10% discount on a lot of high street chains and local restaurants as well.

While I can see this as being a good supplementary recruiting tool, especially for student nurses, I'm against the principle of the union outsourcing anything. The cards would cost the branch £6000 a year, and it would be a 2 year contract, so £12000 all together. I'm sure if we pumped that much money into a mass recruiting campaign then we would probably see more recruits as a result. We vote on this next month.

The third item worth of note was a meeting between our branch secretary and a consultant north staffs combined health care have hired. The meeting a was a renegotiation of our recognition agreement. The consultant wanted a no strike clause in the agreement as well as the deliberate union breaking tactic of allowing non-union members to have union representatives in tribunals/ disciplinary action. The meeting ended in a stalemate, and they agreed to meet next month for round two.

It was the secretary's opinion that the consultant was trying to push it as far as he could in order to show other trusts his union breaking credentials when he sought employment with them. She also noted that the consultant was on about as much (pro-rata) as our chief executive.

The last Item was the unison health care conference coming up in april next year. One idea was putting a motion about the recent 'top up drugs' legislation coming in, which would allow people to top up their NHS treatment with private healthcare, effectivly creating a two tier NHS- one for the poor and one for the rich.

Looks like there is plenty for me to get my teeth into.

interlude

I'm off to my first unison branch meeting tonight, so I'll be doing a full report back some time tomorrow or the day after.

here's some Jesu to keep you going in the mean time. Justin Boardrick is pretty awesome, and this song always gives me shivers down my spine.

The NHS at 60

As a new NHS employee I decided to turn up for the discussion on the NHS at 60. socialist party councillor Dr Jackie Grunsell led off an excellent discussion on the state of the NHS. Needless to say her indictment was damning, anyone with even a passing interest in the NHS can see how despite a massive increase in funding from New Labour, the NHS remains a bureaucratic monster well on the way to privatisation via the back door.

Jackie described the effects of having PCT's and running them as businesses. The effects are plain to see, with demonstrations and campaign groups being set up the length and breadth of the country. Of course the government won't privatise the NHS overnight, instead we have the creeping privatisation of auxiliary and administration services, and of course now the option to 'top up' our hospital visits with private health care.

I won't go into generalities about the NHS, I'm going to post about my experiences within the NHS and private health care.

I've worked for private health care companies all my working life(7 years now), both in the care sector and the education sector. All these jobs involved the provision of support for people with learning difficulties and/or Autism. I can honestly say that in those seven years I've noticed a degradation in work conditions in each successive job I've had. In my last job (before the NHS one) I was on the minimum wage supporting some people who weren't far off being sectioned, so severe was their behaviour. Of course though, as Marx said 'conditions determine conciousness' these residents had to deal with a high turn over of staff and a demoralised workforce. The company used migrant agency workers on 6 month contracts in order to maintain a semi-stable workforce.

I contrasted this with my experience working for the NHS. I've had a 50% increase in pay, I have lots less responsibility and the staffing levels are about twice what I'm used to. Don't get me wrong it's not perfect- far from it in fact, but it's almost a utopia compared to what I'm used to. I've become active in the union, being elected youth officer for my unison branch and shops steward at my work place, it's quite refreshing organising in the open, rather than covertly as I had done in other work places.

Imagine my horror, on my first day to find out that my workplace is under threat of privatisation! Yep North Staffs Combined Healthcare wants to ship out all of it's Learning difficulty units out to the private sector (except the Assessment and Treatment unit) obviously not profitable enough to warrant keeping. Needless to say, I'll be bringing this up at the union branch meeting on the 18th.