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Hospital staff stage their second strike
SKILLED maintenance staff at Mexborough Montagu Hospital have staged their second one-day strike in a dispute over pay.
And if agreement is not reached soon they could walk out for a week over the Christmas period, a spokesman said.
They are protesting at the refusal by Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to pay a recruitment and retention premium under Agenda for Change - a restructure of pay and conditions introduced three years ago.
Twenty-five members of the Amicus section of union Unite at Mexborough Montagu, Doncaster Royal Infirmary, and Worksop Bassetlaw Hospital are involved in the action, and they are hoping to get their counterparts in Unison to join them.
Amicus member Peter Gould said: "At Bassetlaw the maintenance staff are split between Amicus and Unsion so we are going to ballot the Unsion members to hopefully get their support too."
He said that an overtime ban was also in place and they would not be providing 24-hour on call coverage. But he said that the strikers had agreed that if there was any incident threatening patient or staff safety, they would go in to work.
Kevin Coyne, head of the health section of Amicus, joined the picket line at DRI on Monday. He said as far as he was aware the Doncaster trust was the only one in the country not paying the natinally agreed premium.
He said: "This is all about keeping electricians, plumbers and othe skilled workers in the NHS when they could be earning considerably more elsewhere, such as building sites. This went to a tribunal in Newcastle which we won, where it was described as a contractual entitlement."
Don Valley MP Caroline Flint has offered her support to the maintenance staff. She said: "I am grateful to Amicus Unite for the briefing they have provided on this matter.
"My understanding is that the Trust is out of line with other Foundation Trusts in not making this payment to staff. I have drawn their attention to a recent Tribunal that rules on this matter and have asked the Trust to meet with the Unite trade union to resolve the matter."
A spokeswoman for Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: "We are very disappointed that these staff have decided to strike without exhausting all the options available to them for resolving industrial disputes."
She said that the strike should have no effect on patient care or operations, which would go ahead as normal.
She claimed that Amicus had failed to demonstrate evidence that recruitment or retention of engineering craftsmen was a local problem. The Trust took the view that there was no automatic entitlement to receive such payment from public funds and that the national agreement refered to eligibility, not to entitlement.
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Weather for South Yorkshire
Thursday 24 May 2012
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Temperature: 11 C to 26 C
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