WAGE loss and the insecurity and financial hardship that follows is now commonplace for outsourced workers throughout the NHS.

The rise of privatisation means that hospital workers like domestics, hostesses and porters can no longer rely on getting paid in full for all hours worked.

This affects the ability of these workers and their children to live healthy and dignified lives.

Companies like Mitie, ISS and others deliberately set up all of their systems in manner that is as careless as it is complicated — and failure to pay workers the inevitable result.

Lack of access to a payslip is the first stumbling block outsourced workers encounter. The law says that workers should have their payslips on or before payday but many outsourced workers report to the GMB that they have never get payslips at all.

Mitie employees are required to have a payroll number, an email address and a mobile phone number in order to arrange to access their payslip online with the company IT system.

Some don’t know how to use an email and paper payslips are rarely given out, which means they don’t get their own payroll number either.

The erosion of full-time, permanent contractual hours leaves workers reliant on topping up part-time hours with overtime.

Workers are denied full-time contracts even when they request them — and even when they regularly work the full hours in a particular area.

Overtime hours are “tracked” by a cumbersome integrated system reliant on the use of individual Pin codes and the responsible manager getting around to correctly inputting data on hundreds of overtime hours for a particular shift or area.

The result of this system is that low-paid workers are not paid overtime hours because the data goes missing.

Offering part-time hours also enables companies like Mitie to stop paying inner-London weighting on hours logged as overtime.

GMB rep Francis Dwum reported that some workers are contracted to work seven hours a day full-time and three hours “overtime” each evening — but Mitie managers log the three additional evening overtime hours as “permanent hours” and log the seven hours as “overtime hours” to get out of paying additional holiday pay entitlement.

The London Living Wage is used to undermine the traditional right to enhanced pay for working evenings and weekends in the NHS.

Increasing numbers of outsourced workers end up on the London Living Wage even if they work a Sunday, which would normally mean full pay plus an additional 85 per cent pay enhancement for band 2.

As NHS pay is deliberately being held down by this Tory government, the London Living Wage is outstripping the NHS pay scale.

Managers openly tell the remaining workers on NHS contracts that they are not entitled to pay that is in line with the London Living Wage as they get pay enhancements for overtime, full occupational sick pay and more holidays.

The consistent failure to pay any sick pay, even statutory sick pay, is also a constant headache for outsourced workers.

The sickness reporting goes to another private company called First Care and when its operatives fail to capture key information like the reason for sickness, the worker is penalised and the result is no sick pay at all.

It’s a matter of luck whether a worker’s sick certificate gets to the right place in a timely manner — and workers have to engage in guesswork to figure out who to hand their certificate in to.

This quote from an outsourced NHS GMB rep sums up the lack of due care and diligence when it comes to management of the rostering and payroll systems: “Currently all domestics and supervisors put pay queries, sick notes etc into a box that is publicly accessible — a breach of data protection in my view.

“I could very literally walk into the hospital now, retrieve all of the pay queries, annual leave requests and sick notes that have not been picked up by management and walk away with it all and very likely not even be seen doing it.”

Complex and inefficient clocking-in systems further enable private companies to get away with failing to pay workers properly.

The electronic fingerprint clock-in machines often don’t work and confidence in the technology is so low that there are “back-up” paper signing-in sheets and phone clock-in arrangements.

The phone clock-in system requires Pin codes and it is particularly difficult for workers to access.

Having three separate clock-in systems creates confusion for workers who believe they are signing in properly when they just use the finger clock-in machine.

Some workers use all three systems to clock in and they are still short-paid.

No effort is made to resolve the clock-in shambles simply because it is not in the interests of the private company to make sure that wages are paid properly.

All of the line-by-line checking that managers say they do still results in pay being short.

Pay mistakes do occur where staff are directly employed by the NHS but they are infrequent and certainly not the norm.

Pay issues are so frequent for outsourced workers that pay query systems are set up on all of these contracts which sends out a message that short-paying workers is the norm and to be expected.

Most of these workers, migrants who don’t speak English as a first language, are instantly disadvantaged by pay query systems.

They have to navigate filling out the pay query form and then be brave enough to argue their case with a manager who has might have bullied them on numerous occasions already.

Mitie workers in St George’s hospital told the GMB that when they go to the main office, managers don’t even acknowledge them or look up from what they are doing.

Many workers give up and don’t bother going to the manager’s office at all because they know they will be either ignored or bullied.

Other workers submit their pay queries in good time and still find they are not reimbursed or only partly reimbursed months later.

Mitie in St George’s and Epsom and St Helier have been shorting pay for months. St Helier workers staged a protest about this issue on March 5 2021.

In St George’s hospital, workers have postponed collective action following the head of Mitie indicating that some efforts might finally be made to fix the system, but GMB members have made it clear they will not tolerate another month of pay being short.

These issues are common across all soft facilities management employers who are operating in the NHS.

In Lewisham hospital workers walked off the job at the onset of the pandemic because their pay was short two months running when ISS took over the contact in Lewisham hospital.

The GMB Southern Region is now in the process of setting up a contractors’ forum to ensure that we can unite the battles for pay justice for our outsourced NHS members.

We aim to empower the reps and the outsourced workers themselves to share and implement the best ideas on how to effectively resist the systemic abuse and exploitation that is part and parcel of outsourcing in the NHS.

The simple fact of the matter is that these employers are engaged in a toxic game of divide and rule and outsourced NHS workers must find ways to unite together across employers and hospitals in order to effectively challenge this.

Successful challenges have already taken place across our union to secure better wages and conditions, to get outsourced workers back in-house and the resist wholly owned subsidiaries so we already have an excellent foundation to build on.

In the Southern Region we have a developed a cadre of outsourced GMB reps who have expressed a willingness to come on board and lead this important work.

In the GMB we are determined to organise these workers industrially because we cannot allow the fundamental right to be paid in full for an honest days work to be undermined by private companies.

Helen O’Connor is Southern Region organiser for the GMB.