AIR STRIKES

“On Wednesday, August 10th, 2005, Gate Gourmet sacked 800 workers employed at Heathrow. Fellow workers reporting for duty on Thursday 11th August 2005 were faced with the ultimatum of signing a new contract which would slash pay and conditions or face the sack. As catering assistants we are paid just £12,000 a year. As drivers we are paid less than £16,000 per year. These are very low wages by any standards, but especially in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Yet Gate Gourmet is seeking to push them even lower and us even closer to poverty. At the same time, the Gate Gourmet management team awarded themselves hefty pay rises.”
– Open Letter from Gate Gourmet workers.

On August 10th Gate Gourmet (GG), the company that provides the 80,000 hot meals eaten on British Airways planes each day, hired 120 temp workers. At the time they were in the middle of a dispute with the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU), who represented their 2,000 staff at Heathrow, over a plan to lay-off shop floor workers and slash entitlements. They knew bringing in non-union staff while threatening lay offs would provoke an unofficial walkout. They knew that if workers walked out without a ballot they could be sacked without a settlement. When staff gathered in the canteen to decide what to do they were told they had three minutes to get back to work or they would be sacked. They refused. Soon people were being dragged off the premises by private security GG had hired for the occasion.

The next day 1,000 BA baggage handlers walked out in a wildcat sympathy strike (SchNEWS 508) that grounded all the company’s planes and dented their profits to the tune of £40 million.

In case any hearts are bleeding for BA, we should remind you that until 1997 GG were part of the company – sold off during a frenzy of “outsourcing” to cut costs. How does outsourcing cut costs? By passing responsibility for cutting wages, sacking workers, casualising jobs and upping the workload onto subcontractors. Contractors ‘compete’ to see who can impose the shittiest conditions on their workers, who are told to work harder for less or the company who buys their product will go elsewhere, and everyone will be out of a job. Nice. So you’ll be sad to learn that the millions lost by BA in the Gate Gourmet strikes have probably wiped out the savings made from flogging the company in the first place.

In 2002 GG was bought by Texas Pacific, a US venture capitalist firm with a reputation for buying companies cheap when they’re on the skids, squeezing down costs, and flogging them on for a quick profit. How do you cut costs? By sacking workers, casualising jobs, increasing workload… are you starting to see a theme here? Texas Pacific’s biggest problem at Heathrow was a militant workforce with a history of resistance. So they hatched a plan – later leaked to the Daily Mirror – to provoke a wildcat strike. Under UK Plc.’s Thatcherite union laws, workers who walkout without union backing can be sacked – GG could get rid of the uppity union staff and replace them with cheap agency staff, saving £6.5 million a year.

Of course, Texas Pacific aren’t only about saving money. By a weird coincidence, the same year they bought GG their boss, David Bonderman, splashed out 10 million dollars to have Robin Williams and the Rolling Stones play his 60th birthday party at the Bellagio casino, Las Vegas. (No airplane food then?)

STATE OF THE UNION

So where does the union movement stand? The UK has the weakest trade unions in Europe after the Thatcherite onslaught of the 80s. Despite eight years of a supposedly Labour government, workers’ rights in this country don’t even begin to meet the International Labour Organisation’s standards. Solidarity is effectively illegal and traditional union structures are hamstrung. An injunction taken out by Gate Gourmet under the Tory union-busting laws effectively makes the TGWU responsible for public order on the pickets on pain of having their funds sequestered. As one union official put it to us: “It’s illegal for us to have more than six people on the picket line but it’s totally legal for them to lock people in a canteen and tell them they’re sacked over a megaphone.”

One sacked GG worker told SchNEWS “The union have done their best but under current law there is nothing they can do.”

After the sackings, GG applied for an injunction against sacked workers picketing the premises, claiming harrassment (after allegedly sending infiltrators to the demos to start trouble). A union insider said: “It was ridiculous. 70% of the sacked staff are middle aged women” – not the type known for kicking off. Those incidents formed the basis of evidence for a High Court injunction against 37 named individuals and “persons unknown”, making the TGWU financially responsible for any public disorder. GG wanted all demonstrations banned from Heathrow, but the judge settled for reducing the size of pickets to six people or less. The union was only given the evidence five minutes before they got into court.

There’s nothing unusual in companies using outsourcing and casualisation to isolate workers and boost profits. What’s unusual is the way it’s blown up in their faces. Secondary picketing, wildcat striking (striking without asking for permission), and sympathy strikes are illegal (because they work). Yet courageously this is exactly what BA’s baggage handlers did. Mainstream media claimed they walked out because of family links with the (mainly Asian) GG workers, but a union insider told SchNEWS, “The media misunderstood the nature of community in this dispute. There is a strong Punjabi community based around Hounslow, but there is also the Heathrow community of 60 or 70 thousand people who work in one square mile - people who know everything that happens in the airport. Added to that there is the T&G union which dominates Heathrow and aviation generally. These people saw the attack on the Gate Gourmet workers as pre-meditated assault by a vicious American company on a group of workers with a strong trade union history. It was seen as an attempt to break a trade union. It wasn’t just BA workers who went on strike; other workers did whatever they could to help them.”

The fight has spread out of traditional trade union activities and now they are looking to direct action movements for tactics. Our contact said: “We could learn a lot from the corporate campaigning movements. UK Plc needs mobile capital, it needs inward investment. The hire and fire culture is why car factories are being closed down here and not in Germany. Britain attracts investors because of its low wages and the government doesn’t want that atmosphere disturbed. We need to let them know that if you’re going to put a cost on to us, we’re going to put a cost on to you. Closing down Britain’s main entry hub cost them a lot. So let’s hunt down the agencies and the investors - Let’s go through this whole capitalist food chain and find out whose grubby fingers are in which pies.”

Similarities with repression of other movements have also not gone unnoticed: “In the way that the Government used to trial public order tactics in Northern Ireland before bringing them here, now things are trialled on extremist groups who maybe don’t have massive public support, they then enter the mainstream and are used in labour disputes.”

The GG workers are demanding that all 670 who were sacked last week be reinstated, but GG is still insisting that 200 “militants” amongst the group will not be taken back. A group set up to support the sacked workers has begun to target Blue Arrow, the temp agency that supplies scab labour, and they urgently need support.

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The Sacked Gate Gourmet Workers Support Group are calling for solidarity with their demonstrations against Gate Gourmet and the Blue Arrow scab labour agency.

To get involved or to donate funds check out:
 http://www.sackedbygategourmet.org.uk

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