STRIKES planned by security guards at Lancashire hospitals have been cancelled with the guards having won full NHS pay and conditions. The security staff, who work at Royal Blackburn Hospital and Burnley General Hospital, had been planning to stage a 48-hour strike on Sunday April 18 over their private sector employer Engie Ltd failing to pay them NHS rates. However, the hospital workers have now cancelled all plans to strike after East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust took the decision to bring the security service ‘in-house’, meaning that hospital security workers will be employed by the NHS Trust rather than Engie. Unison North West regional organiser Rebecca Lumberg said: “This is an excellent victory for this group of dedicated hospital workers, who stuck together and rightly insisted that they were part of the NHS team.
SCORES of non-medical support staff at Carlisle’s Cumberland Infirmary are to take strike action over a bitter pay dispute that been unresolved for more than a decade. Porters, cleaners, and switchboard staff say they have run out of patience with their employer, accusing the firm of denying them promised pay enhancements for the unsocial many routinely work. The public sector union Unison says that the workers involved were promised extra money for working nights and weekends more than a decade ago as part of an historic national NHS pay deal called Agenda for Change. It included ‘enhanced’ rates – such as time-and-a-half and double time – for working nights or weekends.