The 57-year-old said with years of overtime, blood, sweat and tears, she had managed to raise her children, now in their 20s, with two on university scholarships.
Roziah said while she toiled and suffered, there were thousands of cleaners and hospital workers like her who were single mothers and living in abject poverty.
Today, she mustered the courage to go against her employer’s orders and lead a convoy of workers who will present a memorandum to the health minister in Putrajaya on Feb 8.
Fifteen of them will be riding motorcycles while another 15 will follow in cars, a van and a lorry.
Roziah, president of the National Union of Workers in Hospital Support and Allied Services, said they were demanding that contract hospital workers and ancillary workers be reinstated into the civil service, just like before 1997.
“We are going to demand our Covid-19 allowances that we deserve as we have worked so hard for the past two years without sleep.
“We also want the minister to stop our companies from threatening and putting hospital workers through hardship for being part of a workers’ union,” she said.
50,000 hospital workers facing great hardship
The union’s executive secretary, Sarasvathy Muthu, said there were about 50,000 such contract workers in hospitals. She said there were no pay hikes, the leave days did not commensurate with their years of service and they were being forced to work at four different locations in a single day.
Sarasvathy said pay hikes of RM30 and ex gratia of RM750 were only reserved for a “select group of workers”. She said the workers were also asked to sign new contracts every few years. They were regarded as new staff every time they signed a new contract — causing them to lose out on benefits.
“If you want an example of modern-day slavery, then this is it,” she said.
Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM) chairman Dr Jeyakumar Devaraj was present to show moral support to the workers.
He said the employers escaped from giving these workers their due benefits as the workers were forced to sign a new contract every three years, leaving those with many years of service unappreciated.
“They don’t get pensions, no housing loans, no increment in wages and, if they get laid off, they get nothing. That is simply because they are signing new contracts each time,” he said.
Jeyakumar questioned the government’s moral authority on the matter when it regularly urged companies to be fair to their workers but remained silent on these marginalised hospital workers.
“If the government is saying it is trying to save money by contracting out non-essential services, it is wrong to squeeze the poorest among your workers, making them even more marginalised.
“It runs in the face of a country claiming to be trying to achieve shared prosperity.”
The motorcycle convoy will stop at all 18 government hospitals in Penang, Perak and Selangor before ending up at the health ministry in Putrajaya on Feb 8.