Hospital workers oppose closure

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Cowley Road workers in Oxford have taken a first important step towards saving their hospital from closure.' At the eleventh hour and at the same time as the government's so-called "independent" inquirer was making his final report on the hospital, workers set up a support committee to fight the closure:

The meeting, called almost exactly a year after the Community Health Council had packed out a large hall with those opposed to closure, drew 120 workers and supporters.

Worker based

Although smaller than the meeting a year ago its composition was almost completely worker based.

The middle class benefactors who had confined their protests to string pulling had vanished back into the woodwork as all their eloquent pleading was ignored by the Area Health Authority.

This faces the Cowley Road workers and supporters with the task of forging a strategy which is capable of saving the hospital.

But such a prospect is being blocked by the same NUPE leaders who for the past year have sat back and done nothing to resist the closure.

When supporters of the , hospital have asked at Overwhelming Trades Council what plans NUPE had to resist closure, they were told that such questions were "interfering in the affairs of another union" and that workers at the hospital were not concerned about the closure.

Now, after twelve months of prevarication, NUPE has finally allowed the Joint Trade Union Committee: of local health service unions to conduct fact finding meetings inside the hospital.

The result has been overwhelming. More than 100 workers attended meetings during their lunchbreak to protest about the closure and to complain that they had never been given express chance their view!

But the same union steward, NUPE NEC member Betty Ward, after a year of refusing to call meetings and insisting that workers wanted the closure, is now trying to regain leadership of the movement.

"Another Hounslow"

She is warning hospital workers against involvement with the support committee and agitating against any talk of occupation, saying that this will lead to "another Hounslow" and attacks on patients.

Hospital workers will not lightly be won to a position of occupation. It would be wrong for them not to be concerned about patient care and whạt would happen to the patients.

But what they must call for is an urgent study of what an occupation would mean, so that they can decide on whether to support it, not on the basis of Ward's witch-hunts, but on the basis of facts.

Occupation

If the government report does not overturn the AHA, occupation is the only way workers can detend. ' their hospital.

But those who claimed that protests and visits to Ministers would be enough, have now run out of time. They are reduced to witch hunting those who do put forward an alternative.

PHEW-MADE IT! THE THINGS WE DO TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY! (YES, BUT JIT ALL OF THOSE STANDS,