In her story our work-mate mentions a strike in a local care home. At the time we took part in strike meetings, visited picket lines and distributed a solidarity leaflet at Southmead hospital. You can find the short report and the leaflet after the account from our colleague. We find the exchange of experiences like this important, if you want to talk or write about yours, please get in touch.

I’ve been doing care work for about 30 years, so all my life, since leaving education. When I left school, I went to college to do health and social care. We were the first students to do the course. After we completed the course, the government abolished the qualification, so it wasn’t even recognized. This made it quite hard to get into the care industry. Eventually I did find work in a residential home, with people just needing a little bit of help and support with cooking or washing. It was a private home, owned by a psychiatrist who still works at the NHS hospital. Everyone was well looked after, the staff were amazing as well. I did my NVQ 3 in care.

Working in nursing homes

Unfortunately, this care home closed down when the government changed the funding for people. They were trying to keep people in their own homes rather than sending them to a residential home to be looked after. So people were living at home and struggling at home. They struggled a lot more than what they should have done, before they finally entered the care sector. When they eventually arrive at a nursing home, they’re almost beyond nursing care, to be honest. A lot of them arrive after having had strokes or when they are terminally ill.

In the residential home the care staff were expected to hand out medication. When I first started out in care, we had no medical training at all, we just followed a drug sheet. That was our training: to give them the tablets out at the right time to the right person. And that was it. Later, when I went to a nursing home to work, I realized that actually we shouldn’t have been doing that. You should have had some training in medication. Because in a nursing home, it’s only the nurses who administer medication.

I worked in nursing homes for about 15 years. I worked in a very nice private nursing home with about 30 to 35 staff. It was well looked after and the owner maintained the building. The staff were of a high standard. They had some social funding, but some families would have to pay a top up, depending on the level of care their relatives needed. Unfortunately, that manager sold his nursing home to Bupa. When Bupa took over the place, it took a dramatic downhill spiral quickly. They made a lot of changes to the way we were expected to work, there was a lot of unnecessary training. They lost all the good staff. One by one, the staff drifted off, once Bupa started their changes to pay and conditions, as well. Some staff were expected to sign a new contract. Those of us who had worked there a long time, they kept us on our old contract. That caused a lot of tension between the staff, because there would be new people coming in on a different contract. Once they realised that we were still on our old contract with better terms and conditions, they figured it wasn’t fair. But Bupa didn’t seem to care who they employed. There were cases of unsafe care practices, for example when hoisting patients.

The strike

I left the nursing home and started working doing care in the community. The company also ran a nursing home. Initially they looked after their staff and clients, for example, if you were working a late shift, they had a little mini bus that they would take you home after work. But then all these little perks, they slowly dropped off, one by one. Then they wanted to force people in the nursing home to sign a new contract. The new contract reduced the weekend, night and bank holiday bonuses. People would have earned less, I think it was 20% less. They would lose a lot of money by signing the new contract. That’s what sparked the whole thing with the union.

There were some people in the nursing home who were members of Unison. They went to the union and got it involved. There was a meeting at the community centre. Also non-union members could attend to find out about what was going on. The union had talks with management, on behalf of this staff, which didn’t go very well. There was another meeting with staff and relatives of the people we looked after. It was decided then to go on strike. I would say pretty much everyone agreed, but I am not sure, as I didn’t work in the nursing home directly. But I was supporting the people who worked in the nursing home. I could see that after the staff in the nursing home they would ask us in the community to sign new contracts, it would filter down to us. That’s why I was supporting them, which my manager was not happy about at all.

I was quite surprised at the amount of support that we got from, not just from the staff, but also from family members. There were a couple of MPs who turned up, as well. From the Labour Party. It was quite shocking, as we were the first care company that decided to go on strike. It felt quite privileged that we got a mention in the House of Commons. Some staff were frightened to speak out. We were being threatened. If you were seen on the picket line, you would be sacked. If you were seen making clients’ families aware of the situation, you would be dismissed. That intimidated a lot of staff. Because they couldn’t afford to lose their job. I said: “Well do they want to ruin their reputation by sacking us all, because we’ve been speaking. I don’t think so.” I would speak out in front of everyone. When my manager saw me on the news on the picket line, she was just like: “Oh God, there’s Mandy again.” And that was that.

There was international staff at the nursing home, but I don’t know whether they were scared because of their visa situation. I know that management hasn’t been fair when it comes to international staff. I supported a colleague from Ukraine, but she had trouble getting her papers from the company when her visa came up for renewal. They wouldn’t give her any security that they would actually sign or agree that she could stay. And unfortunately I don’t know what happened there because I left the job before the finalisation of her paperwork.

In the end, when everything died down with the union, they changed the contracts of people working in the community, for example in sheltered accommodation, by offering them a new role. First this looked good, as there were new responsibilities involved, but the contract also included cuts to bonuses. When I became aware of this I started saying to my colleagues: “You do realize you’re signing the new contract, don’t you”. I said: “You’ve just signed away all your benefits that you were getting”. They were shocked and they couldn’t believe the crafty way it was done.

After the strike and the change of contract, the company lost all good staff. Everyone left. Now they take on anyone who walks through the door. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got a caring bone in their body.

Working in the hospital

When I first started at the hospital, even though I had worked all my life in care, I felt that I was right back at the beginning of my career. Because in nursing homes, residential home care or in the community you don’t have machines. You don’t have feeding pumps to deal with or other machines. The first person I went into, when I finished my orientation, she had all these wires all over her. And I was like: “Oh my God, where do I start? How do I start to clean this person? With all these wires attached to them.” It was a real learning curve. And I was very wary. I was quite nervous to begin with. It’s a fast turnover of conditions that you have to deal with. In the hospital, sometimes you watch someone deteriorate right in front of your eyes. You raise your concerns with the right people, but because people are already busy the person is not seen to. That can be hard.

Because of the environment, because if you are on bank, you work all over the hospital. I think you get a wider kind of knowledge, of lots of different aspects of the hospital. Sometimes I feel that you’re meant to know more than what the permanent staff on the ward know. I felt quite alone, as well. Because you would turn up on a ward and sometimes you’d be lucky if anyone spoke to you. It could be quite isolated. Working bank can be quite isolating. I have been in the hospital for nearly three years. There’s a few staff that I see quite often, who I kind of say hi to, but that’s it. I wouldn’t say those are friendships. It seems like you have to work on the ward to actually make friendships. I see some colleagues who also worked at the nursing home before and who are now hospital HCAs like me.

I have been offered permanent jobs, but because of childcare I need the flexibility of being on bank. In fact, families struggle. I see people who are doing housekeeping, who have got little children. They bring the children into the hospital to swap them with their partner. My gosh, that poor child. It’s very difficult.

I had only worked with elderly people. Obviously at the hospital, I had to get used to walking into somebody who might be in their 20s. This was quite hard to begin with. An elderly person, you expect things to go wrong, but the fact that young people can get seriously ill, this is emotionally quite tough. When you look at somebody who is much younger than you and you think: “Gosh, medically they’re really, really unwell, how can that be?” Sometimes nurses are surprised that I know about medication and ask why. I say: “I used to just do care in the community and we would have to monitor people’s medication.” The nurses in general are pretty good. Sometimes I think they put a bit too much on us HCAs. And I think that they will try to abolish the Band 2 HCA positions in the long run.

I’ve worked on many wards with confused patients, shouting and hitting out at staff. I’ve just gone along and started talking to them, gently and calmly. Asking them about themselves, where they come from. Eventually they calm down, once they realise you’re calm and you’re not getting frustrated with them. Quite often nurses ask me how I calm people down. I look at them and I think: “I don’t have a proper answer. All I do is talk to them.” You have to reassure them that they’re in a safe place and that they’re not going to come to any harm. In one situation they were going to sedate a lady, and the lady didn’t need sedating. All she needed was somebody to talk to. I think that people skills sometimes outweigh medical skills.

When management sent the email that bank staff are excluded from the pay increase I felt quite disheartened. When going around asking people to sign a petition, there was actually a lot of support from the wards. They were all turning around saying: “This is outrageous, we can’t manage without bank staff. You are doing exactly the same work” Well, that was really nice to hear from other staff. Why should we be treated any differently? We all go through the same mental impact that a shift can have on you. The problem is that for bank staff it is difficult to meet up and talk about these things, to plan what to do next.

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Strike report and leaflet

We went to a strike meeting with care home workers and their Unison organiser. Since the care company announced the change of contracts in February the trade union membership increased by around 200%. One third of the affected workers are now union members. There are a total of 1,200 workers in the Trust. The Trust makes around 6 to 10 million profit a year. They recently increased the resident fees by 7%, while cutting workers’ pay at the same time.

The meeting took place in a small community hall close to Weston-Super-Mare. There were about a dozen care workers present, most of them white-British women in their 50s. There was also one family member of a resident and three, four union supporters.

The organiser did a power-point presentation about the history of the dispute and the current situation. We then divided into two groups and talked about what to do on the picket line and how to reach out. In my group an older trade union employee took up a lot of the speaking time, which made it difficult to hear workers about what they think about the difficulties of the strike.

What we could gather was that management is booking in additional agency staff and over-book for the strike days. Nearly half of the work-force is recruited through three, four agencies, most of them are black workers, many of them male – which sets them apart from the permanent work-force. They earn up to £7 more per hour, but have less benefits. Some workers are not fully informed about the changes, e.g. management offers improvements in terms of basic pay or maternity, while cutting weekly hours, enhancements and sick pay. Management also offers senior health care positions as a sort of bribe – though on six months training contracts (?), which isn’t that attractive. Management calls people in for 1:1 ‘informal’ chats, which can be intimidating. Workers present at the meeting think many people will go to work and break the strike if offered extra money. Ideas came up about addressing other workers in the area, such as Thatcher’s cider plant.

The Unison organizer maintained that the ‘fire and rehire’-threat is a red line and there can’t be any negotiations while this is hanging over people’s heads. It feels like the union organiser wants to do everything ‘right’, in the sense of modern organising: WhatsApp for residents, ideas to organise renters in the care home village through Acorn; fairly ‘horizontal’ structure of meetings; media and pressure group strategy etc., but the question is if workers themselves are organised enough – the run up to the strike was short and they have no previous experience, it seems.

We tried to establish some contacts with the Sage strikers in London, but was not successful. We want to distribute a solidarity leaflet within Southmead hospital, primarily as a sign to the hospital workers that care workers can go on strike. Draft below. We will go to the picket-lines and hope to be able to find someone for a more in-depth interview.

Leaflet

Southmead hospital workers: let’s support the striking St.Monica Trust care workers in Bristol

Fellow care workers in Bristol have been threatened with being fired if they don’t agree to an effective pay cut.

Instead of playing the victim and hoping that someone else will sort out their problems they decided to oppose management and take industrial action.

In times where there is an enormous staff shortage in the sector, they should have the power to not only oppose pay cuts, but to fight for better conditions.

We can show solidarity by spreading the word, by joining their picket lines and by donating to their strike fund.

But we can do more than show solidarity.

We can learn from them. Inflation will pass the 10% mark this year, while the pay ‘increase’ of the government for NHS workers will result in another big pay cut.

We have to ask ourselves what we will do about this. What to do about work stress and staffing levels?

Do we moan or do we learn from the St. Monica Trust workers?