20.09.2006

Capitalist logic and NHS Logistics

Privatisation of the whole of the national health service may not be on the cards just yet. But an important part of it is to be privatised in a few days. Jim Moody reports

On October 1, NHS Logistics and the procurement services of the NHS purchasing and supply agency (PASA) are due to be handed over to a private company formed by DHL, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Post. A PASA letter of September 5 to its contracted suppliers plays down the profit motive by describing it simply as "outsourcing". But this is not just privatisation: this is a lip-smacking award of a 10-year contract to DHL, worth £1.6 billion.

NHS Logistics has until now been part of the NHS Business Services Authority. If this contract is honoured, DHL will begin to operate NHS Supply Chain as agent of the NHSBSA, with the result that 1,650 workers employed in these NHS supplies organisations will be handed over to the tender mercies of this brand-new DHL cash cow.

Without any criticism of how NHS Logistics has operated, the pretext for its privatisation is that its replacement by NHS Supply Chain is needed to expand the range and scope of supplies several-fold. In reality, of course, there are two reasons why the Thatcherite privatisation agenda continues to be pushed. First, as with other such transfers, this is merely a transparent device to ensure that a multi-billion pound business with commensurate profits replaces a non-profit enterprise. There is no evidence to suggest that expansion of NHS Logistics and NHS PASA as a non-profit formation was ever considered, which rather lets the capitalist cat out of the bag.

This latest privatisation is a political move to transform a service enterprise wholly into one that exists for the benefit of its shareholders and its parent companies. Profit, not need, has to be NHS Supply Chain's primary motivation. Company law demands it. Profit will provide the spur to drive down its workers' wages and conditions.

Second, it is part of a very clear process of disciplining the working class by weakening its basic defence organisations, the trade unions. Privatisation serves to divide and fragment the big battalions and, combined with the anti-union laws, inhibits a united response to attacks across a whole industry - legally banning, for example, industrial action that is not directly related to a group of workers' immediate employer.

In fact no workers in the NHS have struck for 20 years. But all that is about to change. By a whopping 74% the workers who have enabled NHS Logistics to run well for the last six years (it was founded in 2000) have voted for strike action in protest at the privatisation of their jobs. They know as well as the rest of us what privatisation means: an inevitable degradation of their wages and conditions sooner rather than later. Every experience of privatisation has, after all, produced the same result: any hope of public accountability goes out the window and the workers get screwed. And profitability goes up and up.

At the recent TUC, Unison general secretary Dave Prentis announced the ballot result with these words: "These are hard-working public service workers who have never taken strike action before and they are making a stand to protect their service and protect our NHS." It is, of course, more than arguable whether or not the NHS is 'ours' in any real sense, but the trade union bureaucracy is certainly opposed to the weakening of its structures that privatisation brings.

Although Unison, which organises workers at NHS Logistics, has applied for a judicial review of the decision to sell out to DHL, this is not likely until just before the contracted start of the takeover next week. In the meantime, the first of the two scheduled 24-hour strikes is being held from 10pm on Thursday September 21, with the second shortly after.

When these workers go on strike they do so for reasons beyond their own jobs. They do so for reasons that are the concern of the working class as a whole. Although we do not advocate general nationalisation as some kind of step toward socialism, we certainly do stand side by side with workers fighting privatisation. While privatisation is a naked and unadorned direct attack on the workers in the enterprise concerned, it also an attack on the working class as a whole: it carries forward the general attempt to drive down our wages and conditions to maximise profits. This is capitalism red in tooth and claw.

However, the action proposed exposes the limitations of trade unionism. Unison has virtually admitted that the strikes can be no more than a protest aimed at generating sympathy. Since the union is legally required to give seven days' notice of any industrial action, it is a simple matter for management to ensure that medical and other supplies are in the right place at the right time. At most there will be some minor inconvenience until things get back to normal the following day.

Unison members have in any case made it clear that they have no wish to harm patients, who are also working class people. So what these strikers achieve is also limited by their humanitarianism. By contrast, Workers Power has in the past called for plugs to be pulled on patients.

No, our class has higher standards than that. Which means, if such attacks are to be halted, that we have to look beyond trade union politics. Precisely because privatisations such as that of NHS Logistics are an attack on us all and an attempt to bolster decrepit, rotten capitalism and its rule, we have to counter them politically.

The union leaders still look forlornly to the very party that is currently driving the privatisation assault - even if most hope for better things under Gordon Brown. While it is essential to use the Labour Party as a site for struggle (including, of course, giving critical backing to John McDonnell, who has forcefully condemned all NHS privatisations), that must be subordinate to our strategic aim of socialism.

Of course, trade union struggles must receive our full support, but Marxists must always point to their limitations. We must bring to the fore the necessity of going beyond capitalism: fighting for a society based not on the principle of profit and the market, but need and democratically planned production.