A
recent pay offer was rejected by ATOS IT Services and ATOS Healthcare workers
who balloted 80%+ support for strike action and 90%+ support for action short
of strike.
Loath
or love them ATOS members have voted to support industrial action; it's a shame
that such numbers do not resist the quota system they're operating. A system
that serves to impoverish hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people
while driving thousands of others to premature deaths.
It
is beyond me why ATOS workers feel they need to comply with a flawed DWP system
of assessment and the government's blatantly obvious policy of driving down
numbers of benefits claimants, as in the case of ESA claimants being shoved
onto JSA, a less generous benefit.
There
should be no need for health care workers to slavishly obey diktats that order
them to compromise their professional relationship with ill and disabled claimants.
Doctors and other health care workers take a Hippocratic Oath which calls on
them to uphold professional standards; to keep patients from harm and
injustice.
There
are also a number of codes of practice relevant to different disciplines within
medicine. Again these call for practitioners to put the health and wellbeing of
the patient above other concerns.
Indeed
some practitioners adhere to their oath and codes of practice, in some cases resigning
rather than going against their principles. Sadly they are too few; and while
these people should be celebrated for taking a princioled stance against a
flawed system, one that actually coerces its workforce to ignore ethics and
pander to the bottom line, they are too few to move an intransigent DWP which
is ideologically driven.
Proper
union organisation is what is needed amongst the ATOS healthcare workers who
carry out the assessments. A properly organised and politicised group of
workers with a good reps structure in place would go some way to educating
these workers; maybe opening their eyes as to the real class enemy.
However,
the war against the mis-assessments, repetitive and unnecessary re-assessments
and the awful toll in human misery they create can only be won when a
government scraps the present system. Scraps the WCA and replaces it with an
assessment which is transparent, fair and relevant to the claimant. Kicking out
ATOS without first scrapping the WCA with a fit for purpose alternative will
merely change the name of the hate figure.
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