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Picket of women students to protest a rugby stag party. Other campus struggles initiated by women students include the nursery struggle at Brunel University and the support action group for Birmingham women caterers. turning point in the women's campaign. The high attendance and militant mood of the women attending showed that many women had been drawn both into the recent struggles around grants and into the women's movement which is increasingly responding to the deepening social crisis.
For example, during the NUS Week of Action on grants, the major campaign at Brunel was the joint activity of the women's group and the Students Union to secure nursery provision. Its success illustrates the potential strength of the NUS women's The resolutions passed at Birmingham showed that militants want to use this strength to turn the women's campaign into a political focus within NUS, through a well-defined action campaign. The Action Committee was elected to centralise and co-ordinate such activity. But the leadership of NUS see the campaign as simply dispensing information which will raise the consciousness of the NUS membership. Presumably then the membership will take action on the issues facing women students.
The dominant ideas and attitudes of society-male chauvinism and sexism included-permeate the student movement itself. Student unions frequently fail to take up the ideas and campaigns of women's liberation. This means women do not play an active role in the NUS. And a campaign based on propaganda only isn't going to challenge this!
EXI In addition, because most union constitutions state that all unions societies must be open to all members (i.e. cannot exclude men), reactionary student unions have been known to withdraw funds from women's groups.
Thus we must prioritise a number of issues on which women can take action now to challenge sexism in practice in the colleges. We must also ensure all existing impediments to women organising within the NUS are removed. In failing to recognise the importance of both these points the Broad Left leadership of the NUS has ignored two things. First, the principled question of the right of women to organise autonomously. Secondly, the fact is that college groups are essential if women students are to push forward their interests in the NUS. (Indeed, a generalised debate on the question of autonomous organisations can only aid the political development of the NUS itself).
The NUS leadership has a complete blind spot on the key role of women's groups in initiating and directing the campaign. In introducing the false debate that the campaign should include students outside the women's movement they miss the role that the college women's groups can play. Of course, the campaign must extend beyond the women's groups-the question is how this can be achieved, given the problems outlined abovelt is utopian to believe that most student unions will take up the issues facing women students without prompting. The activity of a women's group within the union is going to be far more effective than a directive through the NUS central mailing!
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of many workers drawn into a mass struggle again-its significance it is necessary to examine the NHS and its relThe experience st the erosion of their standard of living by the capitalist system is that the needs of the struggle throw into sharp relief the features of their lives which restrict their ability to organise the fight. This is certainly true of health workers, particularly women, battling against the social contract and the crisis in the National Health Service.
It is no surprise that many nursing militants faced with a relative downturn in the struggle at this time and mounting harassment from nursing management, are leaving the NHS. After a Summer of hectic meetings, pickets, political discussion, confrontations with management, new-found friends outside the marriage mar ket' of medical students and doctors, life in a nurses home now seems totally oppressive.
The experience of the struggle has chamenged years of conditioning into passivity towards authority, subservience towards doctors and scorn for ancillary workers. At the Bolingbroke Hospital, in South London, for example, nurses inspired by their newly-won collective strength, organised a campaign of non- cooperation with particular doctors well known for their bullying and chauvinistic attitudes towards nurses. But such actions have been the exception.
HEALTH ON A SHOE STRING The struggle of the health workers is a new phenomenon in the present crisis of British capitalism, and in order to understand EYPLOITATTON or NURSES ationship to capitalist society.
With the end of the Second World War and the subsequent expansion of capitalism, the needs of the ruling class for a large, healthy work-force coincided with an increasing pressure from the working class for reform, in particular pressure for the introduction of a Welfare State. For the working class the inadequate, unequal, often degrading treatment meted out to the sick was no longer acceptable. For the ruling class, the pre-war system with its separate and bankrupt voluntary and minicipal hospitals and gross mal-distribution of doctors was too inefficient to maintain at low cost a healthy labour force.
The NHS was set up in 1949 by Aneurin Bevan, and it has been able to provide a tolerably good health service at very low cost -chiefly by paying health workers abysmally low wages. Britain in fact spends a lower percentage of its gross national product on health than any European country.
Wages have remained poor for four main reasons. Firstly, most hospital workers other than doctors are women, and women have traditionally been forced to work for lower wages than men in all sectors. Secondly the proportion of unionised health workers is very low and thus they have never been organised to collectively push for higher wages. Then there is the nature of the negotiating structure, the Whitley system which precludes all direct pay
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There is no direct economic result of a withdrawal of labour, how- career structure. In any case, many jobs are regarded as womens"
the march negotiations with management, both at national and at local level, and serves to keep hospital workers divided sectorally into different councils. Lastly, in common with many other public sector workers, hospital workers have no real bargaining power. ever inconvenient it may be, and the genuine concern of health workers for the patients they are treating, makes them unwilling even to exploit the emotional appeal that they have. These factors make their situation quite unlike that of industrial workers. CRUMBLING WARDS - MOUNTING MILITANCY The present economic situation has led to a major crisis in the health service. Not only are health workers experiencing a direct cutback in their standard of living, but also they are faced with a situation of a collapsing health service, made worse by the rising rate of inflation on top of the Tories' £111 million cutback in NHS expenditure. Old buildings are not being replaced; increasing staff shortages mean harder work and intolerably long hours. It is factors such as these which have led to a new level of political consciousness among health workers.
In the last few months there has been a rising tide of militancy on a scale unprecedented in the NHS. In the face of this, the tradition al lack of unionisation has had contradictory effects. On the one hand hospital workers often fail to appreciate the need for the backing of a powerful organisation to spread the struggle, which only the unions are in a position to provide, coupled with the naive belief that the strike weapon is all-powerful ... a belief which can lead to a sharp disillusionment when it is shown to be false. On the other hand, their lack of familiarity with traditional forms of trade union organisation has allowed many health workers to go beyond the forms of struggle posed by the trade union leaderships and to use forms of organisation which are far more advancIn 1970, the average earnings in the public sector were £36 for men and £21.78 for women. Since 80 per cent of the one million health workers are women, their low pay affords great savings on the wages bill and this continues to be so despite the fact that all sections of the NHS apart from ancillary workers have equal pay. This is because the traditionally more militant Photo: Chris Davies (Report)
YOUR men are bought off by promotion to the higher paid jobs in the work", such as domestic and ward orderlies, and are therefore set on a low pay scale.
The low pay of women workers in the NHS makes it particularly difficult for women to survive without getting married or, especially among nurses, striving for promotion, which inevitably brings them into the management hierarchy. Nursing agencies exploit this situation by offering a considerably higher weekly wage + on average £12 over the basic NHS pay for staff nurses of £23 and more flexible hours, but without the benefits of sick pay, holiday pay, and security of tenure. They mainly recruit married women, especially black women who, because of the high unemployment among black males, are often the sole wage earners in their family.
These factors result in a number of serious consequences. Firstly family commitments make it extremely difficult for even the most militant women to attend union meetings outside work -time and to take on any organisational responsibilities. Secondly especially in London, the presence of large numbers of relatively higher paid, inorganised, predominately black agency nurses in hospitals allows management to play on the racist tendencies of There can be no effective fight for a decent standard of living for health workers and against the cutbacks in the NHS without taking up the problems facing immigrant and women workers. This means a clear fight for the sorts of demands raised in the Working Womens' Charter - for free abortion and contraceptive facilities, paid maternity leave, creche facilities and equal pay - as well as for the repeal of all immigration laws and for the abolition of the requirements for work permits that restrict the rights of immigrant workers to be active in trade unions.
APPROACHES TO THE STRUGGLE The Trade Unions, Initially the recruitment rivalry between NUPE and COHSE led them to outbid each other in calls for militant action which lead to an escalation of the struggle. The same is also true to some extent of the other union which has been mostly involved, ASTMS. At the beginning of the actions of the radiographers this union found its own proposals for action to be identical with those of the Society of Radiographers. This forced ASTMS to step up its programme of action in order to differentiate itself from the society.
However the union leaderships have refused to take any action which would begin to bring together even their own members within one particular union - let alone attempt to unite all sections of health workers. They have also fostered the illusion that a high level of militancy by itself can win pay demands. Action independent of the TU bureaucracy. This has largely consisted of action committes set up at the beginning of the nurses' struggle to debate the tactics of the struggle, and to plan initiatives. In many cases these committees have included workers not initially in any union. The experience of the struggle has shown many nurses the necessity of trade union organisation
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- Health workers on the march contd.
SUPPORT US NOW! (OU MAY NEED SUPPORT A6 D resulting in a great increase in union membership in recent months.
The action committees ensured that decisions about action were made by the workers who were involved, not by some distant bureaucracy, In addition to the question of wages, action committees have begun to organise around other issues, such as the Working Womens' Charter which has been taken up, for example, at the High Croft Hospital in Birmingham.
Department of Health and Social Security. Management's response to the crisis in the NHS has been to foster divisions wherever they existed, and to create divisions where they did not. Into the latter category come bonus and regrading schemes which offer some extra payment for greatly increased workloads; reductions in staff, and racism. This category also includes governmental enquiries which allows time for management to prepare to meet demands with the former tactic, that of fostering divisions.
The classic way this technique is used is to buy off the most powerful and militant sections. In the case of physiological measurement and medical physics technicians, the most senior - the supervisory grades - received increases of up to 45 per cent while others of these technicians were to receive only 18 per cent.
HOW WE SEE THE WAY FORWARD The different sectors of hospital workers have many different needs, but one thing they all share is the experience of receiving low pay in a crumbling health service. The current economic situation, the crisis of British capitalism, dictates that the Government cannot afford to put any more money into the Health service-given its present system of priorities. If need be, any Labour or Tory government is prepared to sit back and watch patients die, and the mass media will not hesitate to put forward their view of where the blame lies. The only way we can win is by forcing the Government to change its economic priorities. And that will never be achieved with peicemeal action such as we have at present.
The first priority is to unite all health workers in their strugglies for better pay by adopting one demand which can be taken up by all sections, and can be fought around; a demand which cannot be used to split one section off from another. Such a demand would be a claim for E15 across the board for all health workers, with a minimum wage of E3 £35 (including for all students). This must be coupled with a demand for a sliding scale of wages, so that every percentage increase in the cost of living index would be met with a 60p rise.
On the basis of such a claim, all hospital workers could tight together to defend their standard of living, and all healthworkers should fight in their union branches for the adoption of such a claim.
However, as we have already pointed out, militancy in the health section is not enough. In order to win the claim, we must demand the reassessment of government priorities. And we must draw in other, stronger sections to fight alongside the hospital workers on the basis of defending their own national health service.
In view of the current crisis in the NHS, the first priority must be a fight for an immediate massive injection of money into the health service. However, no amount of money will alter the hierarchical and undemocratic nature of the NHS. or convert it into a fully comprehensive service. Despite the much-claimed egalitarian nature of the NHS, the working class still suffer significantly more ill health than the top social classes, and have a much lower life expectancy. Working class women showed a drop of 23 per cent in perinatal mortality rates during 1956-64, but the corresponding fall for upper and middle class women was 43 per cent. Availability of abortion and child care facilities is almost directly related to social class. The expansion of capitalism has also initiated the growth of diseases such as lung cancer, road accidents, and occupational diseases.
All of these aspects of life should be included in the NHS, but this requires a fundemantal overhaul of the service and a thoroughgoing workers' enquiry into the way the NHS operates. The call for such an enquiry was overwhelmingly supported by a conference on the crisis in the NHS organised by the central London branch of ASTMS in July. Such an enquiry would be the first step towards a fight for a really comprehensive health service, and would draw in all sections of the working class.
Carol Ackroyd Patrick Byrne For more information on the crisis and the NHS and the means of taking up the struggle read:
NHS: a suitable case for socialist treatment, 10p. Crisis in the NHS: Action Programme.
Available from: Red Books, 97 Caledonian Road, London, N.1
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oppression of women'
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HUMILIATE OTHERS? January's NUS Conference in Birmingham appeared to mark a
HOW WOULT FE IF M
FOR NURSES Photo: Chris Davies (Report)
HOSPITAL WORKERS
LO SALARIES
TODA IS DEDIE TON