02.11.1995

Face of privatised healthcare

FIFTY-THREE Asian women cleaners are on strike at Hillingdon hospital. Their jobs were contracted out to Pall Mall Services. Pall Mall is now insisting they take a 25% pay cut from £3.19 to £2.70 per hour. The women were threatened that if they did not sign this contract they would be sacked.

This is an old Pall Mall trick. It did the same to domestics at both Orsett and Basildon hospitals in Essex.

Pall Mall Services employs over 12,000 people. Last year it made £3.1 million profit. Its highest paid director has a salary of £74,652. It is itself a subsidiary of the Davis Service Group. In 1993 this had sales of £279.99 million and made £21.79 million in profit.

The average weekly pay of its workers in 1993 was £123.70. Each worker made the company £1,287.23 in profit that year. They also paid the salary of Davis’s highest paid director, who pocketed £178,156.

It is the women at Hillingdon hospital and the other Pall Mall workers who made those profits and pay these fat salaries to the directors. Pall Mall’s workers provide care; the directors coin in the profits.

Everyone who is concerned about the state of the National Health Service and every healthworker should support the striking Hillingdon hospital cleaners. If Pall Mall gets away with this, other caring healthworkers will face similar attacks on their pay and conditions. More and more of the health service will be sold off to the likes of Pall Mall.

Linda Addison