[FIGHT sets pace CAR IS ALL in the…]

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FIGHT sets pace CAR IS ALL in the future.

At 12 o'clock a mass meeting was held, where a vote for one day strike action the following week was taken and passed by 60% of those present.

However, the stewards WHEN CoHSE members gathered, 150 strong, at the psychiatric hospital in Oxford for the hour of protest over pay on April 14, everyone wondered what we should do next.

A resolution was put at the Littlemore Hospital meeting that we should lobby the TUC Health Service Committee on April 29, to demand that they put the maximum pressure on their constituent unions to call national strike action with essential patient care under union members' control, to win the pay claim.

This was passed with only one vote against.

But what action should we take while our union leaders dragged their feet? How could we push them into action?

The logical step was a one-day strike to carry out this lobby and make it as strong as possible, thus showing our union leaders what we were prepared to do. are divided, and the outcome of the meeting was that our action was deferred in favour of pursuing joint action with CoHSE by collaborating with 2-hour lightning strikes until our own executive gave us national guidelines.

This proposal was passed overwhelmingly.

When April 29 came, the turnout for the pickets was the best in the history of Oxford CoHSE. We decided not just to lobby the TUC, but to charter a bus and a van to go round all the local general hospitals, to meet the workers and to ask them to come out on strike with us when their unions gave the go-ahead.

This we did, with a astic response.

We walked into a NUPE stewards' meeting and they cheered us. Their section had voted 16 to 1 for industrial action on pay.

What they wanted was a week's national strike action, as a build-up. They, like us, felt that such national action would be welcomed as the only way to break the Tory However, as one nurse pointed out before the vote was taken: "The only way we can prove to our leadership that we are serious is by taking local action"

There was general agreement that we had had inadequate leadership, and that we needed to lobby the TUC Health Services Committee and the NUPE Executive to get them to call national all-out strike action with emergency cover only.

Some of us who had voted for a one-day strike went away feeling a bit disappointed, but on the whole we felt it had been a great day. The faces of management when confronted by their own angry employees were unforgettable.

We saw reports of our action in two national newspapers and three local newspapers, and heard reports on three radio stations and two television channels. Not bad for a start.

And finally: to the RCN member who asked who the outside agitators on the picket line were - they were ancillaries from the annexe.

(CoHSE secre tary, Oxford) ory(which we had leafletted the day before, to collect for the strike fund. Carworkers, themselves badly paid, were queuing up to donate money. Their generosity was tremendous.

Meanwhile, back in London, I was lobbying the TUC Health Services Committee along with 18 other Oxford CoHSE members and some workers from Guys Hospital in London. Not only were we not allowed into the meeting room, we weren't even allowed in the foyer of the building: 'You are not on official business!' We handed in our resolutions, adding the information that CoHSE members in Oxford were already on