Building the fight against outsourcing
Trade unionists representing nearly two million workers came together on Saturday for the TUC London, East and South East regional annual general meeting. Ours is a region marked by both enormous wealth and entrenched poverty. Few issues capture that inequality more clearly than outsourcing.
Outsourced workers keep our hospitals, transport networks and public buildings running. Yet they are too often trapped on poverty wages, insecure contracts and inferior employment rights, while multinational firms harvest profits from the public purse.
Recent GMB research estimates that outsourcing drains £1.8 billion from the NHS every year — money that should be spent on patient care, not shareholder payouts. The human consequences are equally stark. Thousands of retired civil servants facing financial insecurity because outsourced firms catastrophically mismanaged their pension scheme. This recklessness is at the heart of the outsourcing industry.
Delegates at Saturday’s AGM passed a RMT motion calling for an end to outsourcing on the railways. Outsourcing firms on the railways extract around £400 million in annual profits — money that could instead deliver a 3.8% fare cut for passengers or be reinvested to improve services.
Labour’s pledge to oversee the “biggest wave of insourcing in a generation” has yet to be realised. But trade unionists understand that lasting change is never simply handed down from above. Real progress is won through collective strength in the workplace.
Across our region, outsourced workers are organising and fighting back. Outsourcing disproportionately affects women, Black workers and migrant workers, many of whom face insecure hours and language barriers that make organising harder. Despite this, unions are meeting these challenges head‑on.
Hundreds of GMB members in Peterborough have just been brought back in‑house after a determined campaign. Unite members at Newham Mental Health Centre secured a 15% pay rise following strike action, while PCS members in outsourced roles across Whitehall won significant pay increases last year. Earlier victories, such as the insourcing of 1,800 workers at Barts NHS Trust, after Unite and UNISON’s joint campaign, underline the power of collective action.
Yet significant obstacles remain. In January, Transport for London signed a new five-year outsourced cleaning contract rather than bringing workers fully back in-house, despite the Mayor of London’s public backing for insourcing. Sustained pressure from the RMT did, however, secure an insourcing pilot as part of the deal.
Supporting outsourced workers is therefore a priority for the TUC LESE region. Through the Our Work Matters campaign, we convene a regional steering group of affiliate unions to share organising experience and expertise. We’ve hosted an ongoing series of webinars and delivering tailored training for trade unionist organising outsourced workers. And through all this work, building the cross-union solidarity needed to turn resistance in to concrete gains.
The message from delegates at our AGM is clear: insourcing is not only necessary, it is winnable. But it will only happen if we all support these workers to organise, campaign and fight to make it so.
To find out more about the Our Work Matters campaign and get involved, sign up to our regular newsletter at tuc.org.uk/lese-news
First published in the Morning Star, 18 April 2026
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