Nye Bevan – pictured - famously branded Tories who opposed the launch of the National Health Service ‘lower than vermin’. Some 60 years on, the vermin have finally gotten round to a counter-attack.
A new dossier compiled by the Conservatives details the horrifying extent of rat, mice, cockroach, flea, bed bug, silverfish and maggot infestation in Britain’s hospitals. On average, every NHS trust in the country needs to call in the pest controllers once a fortnight.
Many newspapers picked up on the findings this morning, reporting them in suitably outraged terms. Rightly so, because this situation is an outrage; as the party that founded the NHS, Labour should be ashamed of itself for allowing such conditions to prevail.
But it remains rather more pertinent to ask how this state of affairs came about, and what can be done to reverse it. At this point, shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley will – if he has any sense – keep his trap firmly shut.
When the Daily Mail runs the block caps splash headline ‘OUR FILTHY HOSPITALS’, what it doesn’t tell readers is that serious problems with NHS hygiene only started after Thatcher’s decision in the 1980s to privatise hospital cleaning services.
The ‘let the market rip’ squad assured us that such outsourcing would free up resources, enabling hospitals to get on with their core business of treating patients.
But they didn’t stress the small print, which specified that contracts must automatically go to the lowest bidder, whether they could guarantee high standards of cleanliness or not. And given the labour-intensive nature of cleaning services, the only way meaningfully to reduce costs was to staff numbers, wage levels and cleaning frequencies.
What a masterstroke. Costs were indeed reduced. The snag is, hospitals became dirtier than ever before. Even where contracts stayed in house, the internal bid was subject to the same pressures – sorry, I mean ‘market disciplines’ – as the private sector bids. The result was a race to the bottom that pushed standards down all round.
Understandably, many loyal cleaning staff upped and outed for jobs that - while still poorly paid – at least paid more than scrubbing the floors of A&E. On some estimates, Britain now has only half the number of hospital cleaners it had 20 years ago. Yet, with higher numbers of patients being treated every year, we probably need more than we did before.
The conclusion is obvious; the renationalisation of NHS cleaning – with employees guaranteed decent terms and conditions and union representation if they want it – underlines just how popular some moves to extend public ownership could prove.
Posted at 13:56, 6 August 2008
Comments (20)
I noticed that one of the demands from the Unions at Warwick was to bring all the cleaning back in house. They should counter this report and name and shame the private cleaning contracters.
Yes, it all started under Thatcher, but what exactly has Nu-Labour done to reverse those polices? The whole trend since 1997 has been Thatcherite with a cuddly smile - what makes you think that the buggers are going to revert to Bevanite polices now?
Dave,
''The conclusion is obvious; the renationalisation of NHS cleaning – with employees guaranteed decent terms and conditions and union representation if they want it''
surely that should read: ''and union representation mandatory.''
Dave
Have you gone soft on the closed shop?
Well, it's a separate debate and it's going to sidetrack discussion of the post, but ...
The short answer is yes, Miles.
I want to see unions that are so good that people bite the rep's hand off to sign up.
I don't think it is tenable to force people to join unions if they don't want to.
I wonder how that figure of two weeks MTBR (Mean Time Before Ratcatchers) compares with, say, the Ritz?
Dave
You might be right.
Your position is also a barrier against derecognition.
When bosses derecognise closed shops and stop deducting subs from wages it causes chaos.
People who have chosen to join and pay the union direct are much more difficult to de-organise.
If everyone stays in the union the formal derecognition becomes almost meaningless.
Also, it's simply a better sales pitch.
I remember my first day in a closed shop shoe factory, aged 16. I had been looking forward to joining a trade union, as a mark of being a proper grown up.
But the shop steward just came up to me rudely and said 'if you work here you've gotta be in the union' and handed me the form to fill in.
And I remember finding that strange. There was no concept that I might actually want to join, because I positively believed in trade unionism.
But that's irrelevant. Tragically for us old punks, the seventies ain't never coming back.
See, I agree with Dave and I agree with John too.
Perhaps a way of creating a culture where unions have to be responsive to workers' concerns, without letting some workers free-ride on others' boldness and organisation, would be a form of the closed shop where workers had to join a union, but not necessarily the same one? A market solution!
Of course, this whole debate is a bit of a nerdish socialist fantasy; it's not like we're going to be faced with a choice between different forms of closed shop any time soon.
Dave - not all hospitals have private companies running their cleaning operations. Many are still in-house. Anyway, NHS management is responsible for the quality of the service delivered whoever delivers it. They are required to get value for money as it is taxpayers' money that is being spent. It doesn't make sense to blame it all on the private sector.
Ex NHS Manager
In our hospital it makes sense to join a union, especially with increasing problems with job banding and high-handed attempts to ride a coach and horses through peoples job descriptions etc in the interests of flexibility etc. Most of the expertise in fighting this lies in UNISON here and people won't get any help unless they join.
And on the subject of peoples right to join a union or not, the older I get the more militant i get on this, especially when people come out with self-righteous guff about 'not being told what to do by a union' My answer: in that case stop parasiting off what the union negotiate for staff, including them, and see how far you get neotiating just your own terms and conditions. People ought to stop pussyfooting round these people.
"Sign here, or fuck off". Clearly a great argument to win non-union members to membership. It's almost as bad as the "you get (sometimes) cheaper car insurance"-"argument" or all that shit.
I'm with Doug on this one. Why should people leach off other people's hard work. Isn't one of the fundamental principles of the workers' movement, 'one for all and all for one'?
Even though some hospital cleaning is still in-house the process of tendering has had negative effects. UNISON has done a lot of research on this eg "An unpublished, but leaked report from the Office of Government Commerce reportedly accepted that ‘efficiency savings’ came from cuts in staffing and some lowering of pay rates and that ‘contracting out had led to a reduction in numbers employed, some change in the terms of transferred public sector workers, and new workers being offered different terms and conditions to transferred employees’ (Wintour and Maguire, 2002).
Competitive tendering has a similar effect on staff even if the in-house team wins. ‘The very process of tendering – in which labour costs are a critical component – acts as a brake upon wage increases, as the higher the pay levels, the greater the cost of the bid and the less likelihood of its success’ (Sachdev, 2004). NHS cleaners often forfeited part, or all, of their bonus to make the in-house bid more attractive (Milne and McGee, 1992). Like contracted out cleaners, in-house teams also saw reductions in overtime and weekend enhancements, as well as a cut in hours worked (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 1997)."
Do I spy one particualrly ugly toad which had got into the first sentence of this?
Ah yes, 'gotten'.
How did it migrate from Houndstown Texas to sit on the wards here?
It's an old English word (click link).
Brief: So are stareblind tulks and gazingstocks that fres on mereswin, have clomb burhs and worke tean an ye tonguas.
Your point is?
As a disabled person I've had to do training with in a hospital, worse as a disabled person in hospital I caught MRSA on three separate occasions.
My local hospital has had serious problems with cut backs, when you have money saving operations it's the lowest of the lowest who get sacked, first it was the disabled people, because well they did not really do anything, then it was the cleaners, then it's porters, then non nurses, then nurses then doctors, but never never management.
My hospital use to have four cleaners per ward, then they finished cleaning they became ward helpers making tea and cleaning up any accidents, but when I was in hospital nurses were told to do this and the Ward cleaners where told to clean wards only they removed 45% of cleaners in one move.
and I caught within a year my first attack of MRSA
Nye Bevan – pictured - famously branded Tories who opposed the launch of the National Health Service ‘lower than vermin’.
Hm... IIRC, it was Tories generally and not just Tories who opposed the NHS who were thus characterised. [It may well be, of course, that there were no Tories in 1948 who supported the NHS.] Nonetheless, Bevan, according to one biography, in saying this, was actually thinking back to the means testing that he had encountered as a young man, which he thought singularly mean-spirited in practice and degrading to the people to whom it was applied.
Just an historical note, of course, and not to detract from the point of Dave's post.