EVERY available trade unionist needs to be outside a hospital with “delegations and banners” when nurses take strike action on December 15 and 20, a nurses’ rep told the Campaign for Trade Union Freedom conference on Saturday.

The From Pentonville to P&O: Union Rights and Tory Wrongs meeting at the National Education Union HQ in London’s Kings Cross saw hundreds of activists meet to discuss existing and threatened attacks on unions and the current strike wave.

Dave Carr, a Unite rep working in the NHS, said health workers had lived with “reorganisation after reorganisation after reorganisation” in recent years, “a calamity of mismanagement and attacks.”

He compared the crisis in the NHS after Covid to the “huge mess” left when the waters recede following a flood, and said waiting lists were so long people were turning to private provision rather than wait years for treatment. “We’re seeing the beginnings of a two-tier system.”

The mood among nurses had shifted, he said, noting that during previous transport strikes health workers often complained about difficulty getting to work but now it was more common to hear people saying “we should be more like the rail unions.

“Most nurses didn’t see unions as an agent of change ... now they are ready to strike not just for pay but to recruit and retain the thousands of nurses needed to care for you and your families.”

But many of those who voted to strike were new to industrial action and needed confidence, he said, calling for an immense demonstration of solidarity to show nurses that the whole labour movement is with them.

RMT cleaners’ rep Bella Fashola also addressed the meeting, saying that on London transport outsourcing companies had “free rein to treat workers however they want.”

Cleaners were subject to frequent short-notice changes to workplaces since agencies used the same staff to fulfil different contracts. But RMT was showing super-exploited workers how to fight back — with cleaners employed by US agency ABM having recently won the free travel afforded to directly employed Transport for London staff.

Reps from education unions UCU, which is engaged in national strike action, and the National Education Union which is balloting for strikes spoke of the effects of commodification of education on the sector and the resulting ill treatment of the workforce.