Outsourcing Spurs Resistance (Eventually!)

With a growing number of disputes sparked by outsourcing public service jobs, George Binette, Hackney North CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer, reports on two union battles near the heart of Whitehall that highlight both the rotten reality of privatisation and a growing willingness to resist

THE END OF MAY (the month, not the ex-Prime Minister) brought a sliver of good news for union activists. Union membership across the UK rose by nearly 103,000 and the proportion of workers in unions also increased modestly to 23.4% in 2018, according to an annual report from the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). While the report offers no explanation for the slight recovery in union growth, it does indicate that it occurred exclusively in the public sector where membership was up by nearly 150,000. In fact, the number of union members among private sector employees actually fell again last year.

The dearth of regional and national strikes, especially more prolonged action involving large numbers of workers, has continued. There has, however, undoubtedly been a flurry of smaller disputes where outsourcing – either its consequences for workers’ pay and conditions, or the actual threat of it – has been the common denominator. A quick survey of union websites and the left press points to numerous protest actions and strikes involving workers employed by private contractors, which had taken over a range of ancillary services for public sector bodies. The list below is hardly exhaustive:

• Mitie has seen protests by GMB members over redundancies and other issues at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, southwest London, and strikes over low pay by Unite members on a facility management contract at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, owned by the privatised British Nuclear Fuels Limited
• NSL, Britain’s largest parking enforcement contractor, finally agreed significant concessions with Camden’s Unison-organised traffic wardens, who, after 33 strike days and protracted talks at ACAS, won a back-dated settlement that takes the minimum hourly rate to £11.48 from this April – 93p an hour above the current London Living Wage
• OCS, a major player in the market for cleaning and facility management contracts, conceded to workers’ demands at Liverpool Women’s Hospital after three strike days by Unison members, seeking parity with directly employed NHS staff
• ISS Mediclean agreed to implement NHS pay awards for outsourced staff at two other Liverpool hospitals, Broadgreen and the Royal Liverpool, after cleaners, porters and other manual workers, organised by Unite, threatened a series of strikes. In Liverpool and elsewhere there have also been protests organised by various branches of Unison, Unite and the GMB over the introduction of a detrimental payroll system by ISS.
• Sodexo, the French-based catering and facility management giant, conceded to similar demands from Unison-organised workers at Doncaster and Bassetlaw University Hospitals after the union members had struck for two days, and
• Princess Alexandra Hospital management in Harlow, Essex withdrew a proposal to outsource the jobs of some 200 domestics after the Unison membership had voted overwhelmingly to support an initial round of six days of strike action.

In a rich irony, two of the most bitter disputes – ultimately triggered by outsourcing – are at Government departments within easy walking distance of the Palace of Westminster. At the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), where a certain Jeremy Hunt is the relevant secretary of state, PCS member employed by the effectively bankrupt privateer, Interserve, have  staged a further week-long strike from 10^thJune, their third action in less than two months. The workers involved, a combination of cleaners, porters and engineering maintenance staff have fought back against management’s derecognition of the PCS, the failure to increase the hourly minimum wage to the current London Living Wage (LLW) rate of £10.55 as well as the implementation of a new payroll system that has left many staff without pay for up to six weeks.

The mid-June strike saw the launch of a food bank at the FCO to assist hard-pressed Interserve employees. The FCO food bank is the second to emerge at a Whitehall department this spring. The first was set up primarily for ISS employees at BEIS, the very department responsible for publishing the report on trade union membership cited above and the department ostensibly charged with ensuring basic employment standards across the economy. The MP for Tunbridge Wells, Greg Clark, is the acutely embarrassed secretary of state at BEIS, where ISS employees have endured a catalogue of payroll errors since the Danish-based multinational took over the facility management contract on 1^stMarch. 

These workers have now had more than enough and in a series of ballots voted nigh unanimously for strike action alongside the department’s catering staff, employed by Aramark, a US-based multinational, whose management claim the company can’t afford to pay the LLW on the basis of its current government contract. The Aramark workers had already staged several lively strikes, totalling 15 days so far this year, in pursuit of their demand for the LLW along with improved holiday and sick pay.

These strikes are of real importance for the PCS, especially in the wake of its inability thus far to overcome the 50% participation threshold in its recent industrial action ballot of more than 125,000 directly employed civil servants. The union has secured public support from Shadow Cabinet members with the likes of Diane Abbott, Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock all visiting picket lines. As importantly the BEIS branch has begun forging links with local CLPs and particularly Hackney North, where Portuguese-born Ana, one of the Aramark workers, spoke powerfully to the May general meeting about the realities of scraping by in London while working full-time and taking home just £900 a month. The meeting responded with a collection of more than £270 and the CLP has gone to organise benefit raising at least £500.

In many respects, these workers – disproportionately women and often migrants – have paid the price for the failure of unions from the late 1980s onwards to mount effective resistance to the large-scale outsourcing and privatisation of ancillary jobs from the public sector. New Labour was, of course, utterly complicit in the aggressive promotion of an outsourcing model, which is now clearly broken even as tens of thousands continue to struggle with the day-to-day reality of poverty pay.

The determined resistance mounted by workers at BEIS, the FCO and elsewhere should serve as an inspiration to others to organise and fight back collectively, as well as encouraging Labour under Corbyn to bolster its commitment to end a privatisation regime that has provided taxpayer subsidised profits for the few, while eroding pay, terms and conditions for all too many.