Hundreds of cleaners outsourced to the multinational contractor OCS at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London will be made NHS employees on 1 August 2021 following a campaign by the workers and their trade union United Voices of the World.
UVW had warned hospital bosses that it would move to a ballot for industrial action and a legal case for institutionalised racism (the cleaners are mostly ethnic-minority).
UVW won a previous victory in April 2020, when Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust gave their 1,200 outsourced staff NHS contracts.
The union reports that "the cleaners – almost all of whom are Black, Brown and/or migrants – joined UVW at the start of the Coronavirus pandemic in protest at what they described as 'institutional racism' as they received far worse pay rates and terms and conditions than their majority White in-house colleagues, including only being given Statutory Sick Pay of about £19 a day rather than the NHS’s full pay sick pay rates".
• More on the UVW website
