Back-pay Battle

Scan page 4

But unless this is implemented, and the information used to press Fifty EGA supporters attended a meeting of Camden and Islington AHA last week to discover the latest date proposed for the closure of their hospital.

Instead they heard a motion calling for an immediate transfer of patients out of the hospital amended to read that a recommendation be made to the Secretary of State that the transfer should take place (a formality) and given his approval in principle, that the local authorities, CHCs and unions should be consulted.

Meanwhile the occupation hospital continues. East End have banned overtime and are working to rule in a dispute which coulą spread nationally.

Since 1964, hospital authorities throughout the country have cheated their employees out of pay to which they • were entitled for holidays and sickness.

- Instead of following a national agreement and calculating holiday and sick pay on the basic rates plus regular overtime, the authorities have paid out only the basic rates.

Now that they have been found out, the AHAs are offering to pay the money they owe at the historic rates-the rates for each year in question since 1964!

Pointing out that rates in 1964 were 20p an hour and that 13 years inflation has made such amounts worthless, union members are insisting that the money they are owed should be paid at 1977 rates.

With the low paid hospitai workers as frustrated as anyone over the way in which their wages have been held down by the Socia. Contract, this claim over back par represents one way they car: express their anger.

Scan page 5

UNION DE

CENTRO DEMOCRATICO This is the first part of a two part article on the June 15 elections by a special 'Socialist Press' correspondent in Spain. The second part, in our next issue, will examine in detail the campaigns of the reformist and StalinPSP numerous meetings of more than 10,000 and the CP's "fiesta" outside Madrid on the Sunday before polling day attracted 300,000.

The record, however, goes to the Catalonian left (Esquerra de Catalunya), an alliance nominally to the leit of the Cr, and led by the Labour Party (Partido de Trabajo) which in Barcelona on the last night of the campaign had an attendance of 400,000.

Again the only meetings forbidden were those advocating a boycott.

The leaders of the Socialist and Communist Parties 'have gone to extreme lengths to make sure that this massive commitment of the working class to change is channelled exclusively through what they have publicly accepted to be free democratic elections.

But the reformist and Stalinist leaders could not prevent, even in their own meetings, outbursts of anger by workers against the monarchy and its repressive law enforcement apparatus. , NO SOLUTION The masses of workers and

----- pull-quotes -----

Ancillary workers at the London Hospital in London's