Cleaning operations at the Bustamante Hospital for Children and the Kingston Public Hospital were scaled down for several hours yesterday as placard-bearing janitorial staff, claiming that they were being underpaid and denied health insurance, protested outside both hospitals.

The workers, who are contracted by the Mandeville-based company Lamasa Janitorial Services, complained of being unable to adequately provide for themselves and their families on their current wages, which, they said, range from about $6,000 to $6,400 each fortnight.

“We feel real bad. We take home $6,400 a fortnight and we have kids to feed,” Diana Codner, who said she is 40-plus and a mother of three, told the Observer. “The job that we do in there is very difficult. We have to clean the faeces. If the children vomit on the ground, we have to clean it. We have to wipe down the walls, scour the whole place and at the end of the day we’re taking home this little bit.”

Codner’s colleague, Carlene Stewart, said their pay was so small that they do not qualify to buy items on hire-purchase.

“Whenever we go to Courts or Singer they say we do not qualify,” said Codner, adding that they do not even qualify for mortgages under the Government’s inner-city housing project.

Codner also said that the company had no health insurance on which the workers could rely in case of illness.

“We don’t have no health benefit. That is another important key thing – we don’t have no health insurance and we’re in a hospital working. Any germs can reach us and the bosses refuse to help us.”

At the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), the stories were the same.

Shirley Pownal, a janitor for seven years, said she had caught a skin infection while cleaning a bathroom at the hospital without protective gear. The infection, she said, spread from her face to her body, causing hair loss from her head in the process. Several other workers at KPH reported throat infections.

When the Observer contacted Lamasa for a response, company director Anserd Williams said, “We are not making any comment at this stage”.

Thaddeus Tapper, chief delegate for the workers at the Bustamante Hospital, said they were fed up with the lack of response from the company.

The negotiations, he said, have been going on for several months.

“From this company is in existence from 1998, we don’t have ID,” said Tapper, a porter for seven years and a father of two children. “The uniform is rationed right now because is over four years we don’t get uniform. Workers have to be buying uniform for themselves. We are in a very desperate position right now.”

Tapper suggested that an increase to $10,000 each fortnight with benefits would suffice.

“I have had many meetings with the management,” said Tapper. “Also, the union (the National Workers Union) intervened, and there is nothing. The managers not coming with anything; sometimes they don’t turn up to meetings. We had a meeting on December 23 and the managers promised us they would do better. But up to now, it is no better.”

Senior NWU negotiating officer Robert Harris attested to the lack of any real progress in the negotiations over recent months.

“We had referred some issues to the ministry a couple of weeks ago but Lamasa, I think, was proving to be very evasive in terms of carrying them down to a date (so) we have a wage negotiation that has been stalled,” he said.

Additional reporting by Paul Henry