Outsourced cleaners win return to NHS
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children has announced it will bring outsourced cleaners in-house following a campaign by the United Voices of the World (UVW) union.
Hundreds of cleaners will become NHS employees on 1 August 2021 following the victory, which follows decades of outsourcing at the hospital. Its announcement came as the union prepared to ballot for strike action.
This is the second similar win this year for the UVW, after Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust gave their 1,200 outsourced staff NHS contracts in April.The UVW reports that the GOSH cleaners joined the union at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in protest at what they described as “institutional racism”.
Petros Elia, UVW organiser and co-founder, commented: “This victory is historic. It shows, firstly, that workers united with a union ready to back them really can move mountains. It also shows that as easily as the NHS and other public institutions outsourced thousands of workers at the stroke of a pen 30 odd years ago, so too can they now choose to in-house them at the click of a mouse.”