The 24 minute short documentary from 1985 portrays the work and life of women workers in a NHS hospital laundry that is threatened with closure due to outsourcing. 

I really like the film, because nowadays many documentaries don’t show what manual workers actually do or don’t let them talk for themselves. The women in the film describe their work confidently, they manage to operate the laundry despite old and faulty machinery, they are aware of the fact that the close cooperation with the hospital workers is a major factor in a rational organisation of work. Despite the looming closure and the personal worries attached to it, the film doesn’t turn into a sob story. 

The film was directed and shot by women, which will have contributed to the fact that the domestic sphere of the workers is included. The women workers continue with laundry work at home and take care of parents, grandchildren and sick husbands. At the same time the private household is a stone around the neck, the mortgage for the house is one of the main concerns. In this sense it is a film about the working class in the UK of the mid-1980s, caught between the ongoing defeat of the wider industrial workforce, last but not least the miners, and the lower rungs of the privatised housing ladder.

I rate the common sense in the film. We can only work collectively. Our work is important for other workers, first of all working class patients. We take on a responsibility for that. The state runs down our means of production, but we can improvise together to make things work. Under these conditions work is not the meaning of life though, we come here for the money.

Based on such common sense we can develop a collective militancy to confront the rule of the state and the bosses – like our brothers and sisters at Bonaparte Hospital in Buenos Aires or the ex-GKN car workers in Firenze.