KUWAIT: For the second time in a week, work at a local hospital was hampered by a strike by cleaning staff, with cleaners and hospital porters at Adan Hospital striking yesterday over the failure of the contracting company that employs them to pay their wages or renew their expired residency visas.

Adan Hospital director Dr. Adel Al-Abdulrazzaq emphasized that the contracting firm, rather than the hospital, was to blame for the workers' plight, condemning the company's failure to pay their wages for many months.

[The cleaners' and porters'] visas expired and they don't have enough money to come to work," he said, pointing out that the hospital has contacted the Ministry of Health (MoH), requesting it to take proper legal action against the firm.

Al-Abdulrazzaq also indicated that the hospital administration had been forced to provide 50 temporary cleaning workers from another company to provide cleaning services in order to ensure that work at the hospital, especially in the Outpatients' Department, was not completely brought to a standstill by the striking workers' protest.

The hospital director also accused the registration and clerical staff of failing to cooperate with the administration during the period of strike action, saying that they had refused to carry out the duties usually performed by the striking porters, instead gathering in a side room to avoid irate patients who had to walk up and down the stairs to the basement themselves to retrieve their own medical files before seeing a doctor.

That huge army of workers should have given up their comforts and shown some responsibility, helping to serve patients," Dr. Abdulrazzaq insisted. - Kuwait Times