UK
GFM workers win 15% pay rises
Workers' Liberty
Outsourced NHS workers at Newham Centre for Mental Health have won a tremendous victory in their campaign for NHS equivalent pay, terms and conditions. After six weeks of escalating strikes this autumn, Unite members voted to accept a significant uplift in pay, terms and conditions. They started their strikes as some of the lowest paid workers in London’s NHS. They return to work as union people, on union terms.
Through their solidarity and determination, Newham’s domestics, porters, kitchen and reception staff by Grosvenor Facilities Management have won a 15% pay rise for the lowest paid workers (10% for middle grade, 5% for supervisor grades), an extra week’s annual leave, and two months full sick pay. The company has also agreed to end victimisation of union members and recognise the union.
The GFM strike began in September 2025 but initial organising started during the pandemic. During a 2021 union health and safety inspection, safety reps first met GFM workers and discovered they were not entitled to occupational sick pay. If they had to isolate following public health advice, the most they would receive was Statutory Sick Pay paid at less than £100 a week. The financial pressure was driving infectious workers into work undermining hospital safety.
Union pressure resulted in some isolation pay being offered to the GFM workers 2021 but this provision was then stopped in Autumn 2022 as the NHS withdrew the subsidies it offered private contractors as part of the new “Living with Covid strategy”. The union safety reps maintained contact with GFM workers during that time through repeat safety inspections and began discussing the idea of organising a union capable of effective strikes. In 2023 a group of workers joined the union and started organising, recruiting to the union and raising the idea of a strike. We organised a mass meeting in the canteen, addressed by reps from neighbouring Bart’s Unite branch who had just won a successful insourcing campaign through sustained strikes.
Following this meeting, many more workers joined the union and in autumn 2024 Unite applied for union recognition and submitted a pay claim for NHS equivalent pay terms and conditions. At every stage we recruited to the union on the basis that we were going to strike and escalate until we win.
Over the summer the workers delivered a 100% vote for strikes and set out their first dates with a view to escalating. The picket lines from the start were a noisy and attracted support from the wider trade union movement. Armed with horns, megaphones and speakers, the GFM pickets took their protest from the hospital gates to the offices of the PFI company, NHS Trust HQ and other GFM sites.
Unite has a policy of offering £70 a day strike pay, and that came close to covering the lost wages for the lowest paid workers who made up the bulk of the union group. However, the success of the strikes was dependent on building a strike fund that could sustain us for a long battle. We had good support from the local trade union movement and left and trade union donations flooded in that allowed us to increase strike pay to full pay by the November strikes.
The strike demonstrates an important truth: our work is essential and without our labour our workplaces cannot function. For six weeks the company tried to run the hospital with bank staff, probationers and workers bussed in from sites outside London. For six weeks, conditions within the hospital deteriorated while the most experienced staff were on the picket line. During the October strikes, Unite health and safety reps did an inspection of the hospital detailing these deteriorating conditions and the substandard service provided by this private contractor.
At each stage, union reps stressed that this was not a strike to register a protest. Rather the workers were no longer willing to work for the poverty pay, terms and conditions that GFM were offering. In every negotiation, and at every opportunity, the message to the employer was that the workers were united and were not going to stop until their demands were met.
The strike brought into focus the disgusting waste involved in the NHS’s PFI schemes. In 2001-2 Newham Centre for Mental Health was built for about £14.5 million as a Private Finance Initiative. In exchange for the use of this hospital, the NHS agreed to pay the PFI company £213 million over the next 30 years. This year the NHS paid over £8 million in PFI fees. Perhaps as much as £6 million of this sum is extracted in profit and executive salaries by GFM and their PFI partners, with little left over to pay the workers actually doing the work of servicing and maintaining the hospital. At the start of the dispute, GFM management complained that their hands were tied by contractual arrangements with their PFI partners and there was really very little profit being made. The resolution of this dispute demonstrates that there are forces more powerful than the contractual arrangements of the capitalist class.
The East London Mental Health Unite branch is seeking to build on this victory. First it is important that GFM workers at other sites are aware of this victory and are given the opportunity to organise their own disputes to level up pay, terms and conditions. Most urgently, as concern rises for winter flu season, the union will insist that full sick pay is implemented in all GFM sites as an urgent infection control measure. Second, the branch is planning to coordinate a campaign for full sick pay for all across the NHS.
It is a national disgrace that six years after the start of the pandemic, there are still frontline health and social care workers who cannot afford to take time off when sick and infectious. The strikes at Newham, Bart’s and elsewhere show that trade union organising can achieve what reasoned argument alone has not been able to achieve. Through organising around health and safety in the NHS we can rebuild union power and create a force that can win safety critical improvements in the health service even at a time of cuts.
Workers' Liberty
Author: Gerry Bates
16 December, 2025
Outsourced NHS workers at Newham Centre for Mental Health have won a tremendous victory in their campaign for NHS equivalent pay, terms and conditions. After six weeks of escalating strikes this autumn, Unite members voted to accept a significant uplift in pay, terms and conditions. They started their strikes as some of the lowest paid workers in London’s NHS. They return to work as union people, on union terms.
Through their solidarity and determination, Newham’s domestics, porters, kitchen and reception staff by Grosvenor Facilities Management have won a 15% pay rise for the lowest paid workers (10% for middle grade, 5% for supervisor grades), an extra week’s annual leave, and two months full sick pay. The company has also agreed to end victimisation of union members and recognise the union.
The GFM strike began in September 2025 but initial organising started during the pandemic. During a 2021 union health and safety inspection, safety reps first met GFM workers and discovered they were not entitled to occupational sick pay. If they had to isolate following public health advice, the most they would receive was Statutory Sick Pay paid at less than £100 a week. The financial pressure was driving infectious workers into work undermining hospital safety.
Union pressure resulted in some isolation pay being offered to the GFM workers 2021 but this provision was then stopped in Autumn 2022 as the NHS withdrew the subsidies it offered private contractors as part of the new “Living with Covid strategy”. The union safety reps maintained contact with GFM workers during that time through repeat safety inspections and began discussing the idea of organising a union capable of effective strikes. In 2023 a group of workers joined the union and started organising, recruiting to the union and raising the idea of a strike. We organised a mass meeting in the canteen, addressed by reps from neighbouring Bart’s Unite branch who had just won a successful insourcing campaign through sustained strikes.
Following this meeting, many more workers joined the union and in autumn 2024 Unite applied for union recognition and submitted a pay claim for NHS equivalent pay terms and conditions. At every stage we recruited to the union on the basis that we were going to strike and escalate until we win.
Over the summer the workers delivered a 100% vote for strikes and set out their first dates with a view to escalating. The picket lines from the start were a noisy and attracted support from the wider trade union movement. Armed with horns, megaphones and speakers, the GFM pickets took their protest from the hospital gates to the offices of the PFI company, NHS Trust HQ and other GFM sites.
Unite has a policy of offering £70 a day strike pay, and that came close to covering the lost wages for the lowest paid workers who made up the bulk of the union group. However, the success of the strikes was dependent on building a strike fund that could sustain us for a long battle. We had good support from the local trade union movement and left and trade union donations flooded in that allowed us to increase strike pay to full pay by the November strikes.
The strike demonstrates an important truth: our work is essential and without our labour our workplaces cannot function. For six weeks the company tried to run the hospital with bank staff, probationers and workers bussed in from sites outside London. For six weeks, conditions within the hospital deteriorated while the most experienced staff were on the picket line. During the October strikes, Unite health and safety reps did an inspection of the hospital detailing these deteriorating conditions and the substandard service provided by this private contractor.
At each stage, union reps stressed that this was not a strike to register a protest. Rather the workers were no longer willing to work for the poverty pay, terms and conditions that GFM were offering. In every negotiation, and at every opportunity, the message to the employer was that the workers were united and were not going to stop until their demands were met.
The strike brought into focus the disgusting waste involved in the NHS’s PFI schemes. In 2001-2 Newham Centre for Mental Health was built for about £14.5 million as a Private Finance Initiative. In exchange for the use of this hospital, the NHS agreed to pay the PFI company £213 million over the next 30 years. This year the NHS paid over £8 million in PFI fees. Perhaps as much as £6 million of this sum is extracted in profit and executive salaries by GFM and their PFI partners, with little left over to pay the workers actually doing the work of servicing and maintaining the hospital. At the start of the dispute, GFM management complained that their hands were tied by contractual arrangements with their PFI partners and there was really very little profit being made. The resolution of this dispute demonstrates that there are forces more powerful than the contractual arrangements of the capitalist class.
The East London Mental Health Unite branch is seeking to build on this victory. First it is important that GFM workers at other sites are aware of this victory and are given the opportunity to organise their own disputes to level up pay, terms and conditions. Most urgently, as concern rises for winter flu season, the union will insist that full sick pay is implemented in all GFM sites as an urgent infection control measure. Second, the branch is planning to coordinate a campaign for full sick pay for all across the NHS.
It is a national disgrace that six years after the start of the pandemic, there are still frontline health and social care workers who cannot afford to take time off when sick and infectious. The strikes at Newham, Bart’s and elsewhere show that trade union organising can achieve what reasoned argument alone has not been able to achieve. Through organising around health and safety in the NHS we can rebuild union power and create a force that can win safety critical improvements in the health service even at a time of cuts.
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