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MARCH TOGETHER TODAY... THEn STRIKE TOGETHEr!

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TUC name the date for a 24-hour general strike!

The National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) welcomes todays TUC demonstration to defend the NHS and oppose the rest of the Con-Dem austerity offensive. The NHS has the potential to be the issue that unites all those suffering under the brutal cuts into a mass movement that can confront this Government. Already this year, mass action by the campaign to save Lewisham hospital, including a 25,000-strong demonstration and legal challenge, has thwarted health secretary Jeremy Hunts plans to scrap A&E and other key hospital services. In April, 50,000

marched against the threat of closure to Stafford hospital, almost the total population of the town! Strike action by NHS staff at Mid Yorkshire Health Trust recently won important concessions on pay and redundancies. At Whipps Cross in East London, the Unison health branch has organised protests and is ready to call strike action if necessary. Both of these latter struggles have been led by NSSN supporters. In 2004 Tory cabinet minister Oliver Letwin boasted that the NHS will not exist within five years of a Conservative victory. In April 2013, the Health and

Social Care Act opened the floodgates to the private sector. Since then nearly 200 contracts, worth 2.5 billion, have been offered to outsource NHS services. The NHS is set to become a US-style state subsidised private healthcare market. In the US, 62% of the 900,000 personal bankruptcies a year are due to medical expenses. The Daily Mirror recently revealed that a contract for NHS brain cancer treatment was handed to the worlds largest private hospital group, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) that just happened to be a Tory Party donor. HCA was part of the largest healthcare fraud according to the US Justice Department and in Tennessee paid doctors to refer patients to their facilities. Successive Tory, Labour and now Coalition governments have privatised and undermined the NHS. There is a scramble among the big health corporations to get their snouts in the trough. But as welcome as todays mobilisation is, on its own it wont be enough to force Cameron and Co into the same kind of retreat they suffered on Syria, which showed once and for all how weak this government is. The demonstration should be the public launch pad for mass strike action that would unite behind the trade unions all those suffering from NHS cuts, attacks on welfare, the hated bedroom tax, zero-hour contracts and the collapse in living standards because of the pay freeze. We lobbied the TUC Congress earlier this month to call on the unions to organise a 24-hour general

strike. But a strike this autumn that co-ordinated all those unions and workers currently in dispute the teachers, firefighters, Royal Mail workers, civil servants and lecturers, alongside the many others taking action every day like the One Housing workers in London and the victorious Wigan Hovis strikers would be a massive step in this direction. Today we march together against the Tories but if we strike together in the numbers we saw on the 2 million-strong N30 2011 pensions strike but this time keep it going and escalate it, we can claim a famous victory for all those suffering from these brutal cuts.

Affiliate to the NSSN (Annual affiliation fee is 50). Please move this at your union branch, shop stewards committee, trades council, etc.
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You can also take out a monthly standing order for a few pounds to: National Shop Stewards Network, HSBC, account number 90143790, sort code 40-06-41