The HSJ reported last week that the consortium designated as 'preferred bidder for the UHL PFI project has decided to sue the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust over the scrapping of the £921m scheme.

The UHL obviously are being cautious about saying anything. I hope UNISON shows no such qualms.

This decision should announce the death knell of PFI. The building firms' case essentially amounts to saying that once they were designated as preferred bidder the hospital was contractually obliged to proceed with the plans, even though the builders could put the costs up as much as they liked, and the plans had already been slashed to make them (ahem) affordable by the NHS in Leicestershire. The DH and the UHL finally realised the project was "no longer value for money" and pulled the plug in July 2007. Had the project gone ahead, the local NHS would have been desperately overstretched and the consortium would have been quids-in. Because the builders raised their prices just once too often, they now want compensation for their missed chance at the gravy train. Arrogance, ignorance and greed indeed. That's capitalism for you, and further demonstration, should one be needed, of why finance capitalism is a very poor tool for building healthcare systems.

 I was reading the interesting NHS Blog Doctor and was struck by the latest round of debate about the various merits of private healthcare as opposed to "socialised" healthcare a la the NHS.

Readers of this blog might not be in need of any justification themselves for publically funded health care, but we should all be equipped with some facts and figures becauseincreasingly this argument is coming up, and is gaining currency even within circles that twenty years ago would not have dreamed of suggesting that profit should be anywhere near health care. This is the legacy of New Labour - now privatising the NHS isn't anathema.

According to the BBC, even the Tube bosses have been forced to admit that today's Tube strike has had a major impact, reporting that "all lines were affected and some had no service". The RMT and London Underground spent yesterday at ACAS, but no deal could be done, so the strike is on.

Since the BBC quote extensively from the CBI, some shadowy quango called 'London First' and basically everyone in London apart from any tube workers, I don't think I'll be relying on them for news of the dispute. Instead, I'll keep my eye on the excellent website of RMT's London Regional Council which is a bit more 'ear to the ground'. Apparently LUL management are misrepresenting the issues in the dispute. Surely not!

The threat of a strike ballot amongst UNISON members working for Serco, Medirest and ISS has had two new effects over the last 24 hours.

Yesterday, apparently, senior bosses were seen 'on the shop floor' - something of an unusual occurrence to say the least. Several reports filtered in to the union office of the senior managers turning up unannounced to chat with workers as they carried out their daily duties, chats which somehow turned swiftly towards the Agenda for Change dispute, and the prospects of a strike ballot. Hopefully the managers will have got the message that staff are serious about winning what is due to them, and that the back-dated pay must be paid.

There's been lots of discussion in UNISON recently about the issue of safe staffing levels, and how to organise a campaign to mobilise members to defend staffing levels and fight job cuts. Much of the discussion has centred on how difficult it allegedly is to get staff to take action, especially in defence of jobs which are vacant as opposed to fighting actual redundancies. I'd find that argument easier to accept if it came from people who actually had organised fights against redundancies, but it too often sounds like an excuse: "We can't fight these cuts because the members won't follow our lead," say union officials who don't have any intention of giving such a lead in the first place.

On Friday, we met with management side representatives from the UHL and their three private contractors - Serco, ISS and Medirest - to discuss the consultative ballots recently held by UNISON, and the "next steps".

It turned out that the most positive thing we could say about the meeting is the fact that it happened - despite years of UNISON asking to meet all three contractors together and being told that such a meeting was impossible for "commercial reasons" we have finally managed to meet all the parties involved at the same time. Progress, of sorts.

But they had nothing new to tell us.

As I was writing the previous post, about the efforts being made by UNISON members working at Leicester's hospitals for Serco, ISS and Medirest to win their back-pay, I received this week's email alert from LabourStart. Every 4glengate.net reader is probably already familiar with LabourStart, the world's premier internet news service for trade unionists, and the online campaigning which they undertake on behalf of trade unions and workers. This week's email alert contained an appeal from Algeria, where workers living in tent cities provide sub-contractor services to a host of multinationals based in Hassi Messaoud, an oil fortress 850km south east of Algiers.

I haven't posted anything for a while, because of work pressures and just having far too much real world stuff to deal with, but the 4glengate.net blog will be back in action over the next few weeks (at least) because I'm going to be reporting regularly on the campaign in our UNISON branch to secure equal pay for our members working for private contractors within the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust.

The UHL, like all hospitals in the NHS, is required and expected by the Department of Health, to implement, in partnership with its contractors and the unions, the "National Framework Agreement" - which is designed to end the so-called two-tier workforce by bringing all contractor staff into line with Agenda for Change; not just their basic pay and job evaluation, but all terms and conditions as well. Currently it doesn't include pension provisions, the 'equality' of which is governed under different rules, and it doesn't apply to contractor staff working on "hard Facilities Management" (broadly, outside or mechanical work, commonly conducted by Estates Departments), but apart from those issues, the National Framework Agreement represents a major step forward in the NHS. Thanks to the agreement, increasing numbers of the poorest paid workers in the health service can now enjoy the same holiday entitlements, the same sick pay arrangements, the same night and weekend enhancements and the same job banding system as their colleagues working directly in the NHS. Getting contractors in to do the catering, cleaning and portering "on the cheap" will no longer be an option for NHS hospitals.

Just because I've not been paying attention (you know, real life and stuff) I hadn't spotted John's union demotivator, inspired by the good, er, mediocre folks at Despair, Inc. and their charming rebuttals to those godawful motivational posters which I've only ever seen in the pages of the Viking Direct catalogue, but which friends who work in the private sector tell me often grace their office walls.

I have a real soft spot for the 'Government' one.

Despite being something of a geek and an active trade unionist, I've tended to steer clear of the union movement's attempts to engage with "Web 2.0" apps like Facebook and Second Life. For one thing, I've got enough to do coping with my first life, and I've never really been persuaded that giving information about my interests and social relationships to a corporate website is a good way for trade unionists to organise.

But there clearly are some real advantages to being able to organise ourselves in online communities, and the tools themselves could be valuable. So I'm excited by the possibilities presented by the UnionBook project - a social networking site for trade unionists, by trade unionists. Built by the same people who run the LabourStart labour news website and online campaigning resource, UnionBook is constructed from the open source social networking software ELGG.