About 30 workers made some noise on the perioperative assistants’ picket line outside St James’s University Hospital today — affectionately known across Leeds as Jimmy’s — waving flags and getting cars honking in support. Supporters from socialist groups, Unite Community and Troublemakers at Work turned up to back the strike and help out.
The Theatre Operatives earn just 20p an hour above the minimum wage for a complex job. Working in and around operating theatres entails serious responsibility and serious consequences if something goes wrong. Workers can have to stay for hours beyond their shift if surgery is postponed or prolonged.
Weeks of training are required, and the workers often carry out tasks above their pay grade, given NHS understaffing and the demands of an operating theatre. It is these workers who help ensure the entire complicated process of surgery, from pre-op to post-op and recovery, is conducted in a safe, sterile environment and that patients are supported throughout. Everyone undergoing surgery relies on these important but unsung workers for their successful operation and recovery.
That isn’t a minimum-wage job. Since 2021, more than 100 NHS trusts and health boards across England and Wales have agreed regrading and back-pay settlements for healthcare support workers carrying out comparable duties. Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is still holding out.
In fact, the trust’s interim chief executive, Brendan Brown, previously led Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust, where a similar agreement saw theatre and maternity healthcare assistants moved up a grade and awarded five years’ back pay.
So what’s different in Leeds? A victory for the Theatre Operatives could encourage other underpaid grades to do the same. Too right. The fact is that the entire NHS workforce is underpaid, as the nurses’ and doctors’ strikes of recent years have shown, and that is the result of decades of underfunding on a massive scale. Strikes like this expose that reality and are a step towards fighting to reverse it.
Up to 100 workers are involved in the dispute and are solidly behind the all-out strike after the two-week strike in the summer failed to force management to shift on grading. They have already taken 40 days of strike action since the dispute began last December. It was also great to see a delegation of Jimmy’s workers attend the picket line in uniform during a break to show their support.
Workers on the picket line voiced concern that a couple of colleagues were covering shifts of striking workers for an enhanced rate, and that the bosses might simply refuse to give in. The branch should wage a high-profile leafleting campaign among hospital staff for full support and solidarity.
The Theatre Operatives are absolutely right to take all-out action. That is the way to put maximum pressure on management and attract the attention not only of the media, exposing the injustice, but crucially of the wider trade union movement in Leeds.
There should be a massive solidarity appeal across Leeds for the trade union movement to back the strikers — not just with solidarity messages and donations, but with delegations to support the daily picket lines. A solidarity committee and strike fund should be launched if management refuses to budge.
Workers, trade unionists and everyone who supports the NHS can come by for five minutes or five hours to show solidarity and help out. There is loads to do — holding up signs explaining the strike to drivers, leafleting staff and patients — but most important is letting the workers know that they are seen, appreciated and supported.
The workers will be on strike at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) tomorrow, Thursday 8 October, followed by a mega-picket at LGI on Friday 9 October. Everyone who can should get down on Friday and show their support.
Next week there will be pickets from 9am to 11am, Monday to Wednesday at LGI and Jimmy’s from Thursday to Friday
