A public meeting was organised by South Asia Solidarity Group on 6th October in London, which brought together representatives of strikers from the picket line at Gate Gourmet – the majority of whom are middle aged Asian women - as well as members of various support groups.
Sacked workers are still on the picket line outside Gate Gourmet after the Transport and General Workers Union struck a deal with the management on 27th September. According to the deal, 144 strikers were forcibly made redundant and 7 were to remain sacked with no compensation. Nobody except the management knows yet who those sacked strikers exactly are, which further accentuates the need for continued solidarity.
At the same time 3 baggage handlers at Heathrow Airport who had taken part in the magnificent 1000-strong one-day sympathy strike are still suspended.
According to the Gate Gourmet workers 'it is not over yet!'
The meeting has revealed a shameful if unsurprising disregard for the strikers on the part of the rich T&G which offers strikers (who are already financially struggling) a meagre £50 per week from the hardship funds.
Moreover, previously little known details were disclosed about the bestial manner in which the Gate Gourmet company - which has been making profits of £1.05bn and has assets of £15 billion - one-sidedly brought in 130 agency employees, dictatorially refusing to answer workers’ questions only to subsequently announce on a megaphone that they were all sacked, then locking them (!) in the canteen without any food and water or access to toilets for almost eight hours (there were pregnant women among the workers). Private security firms and riot police were on the premises within minutes. The shop steward was later literally thrown out of the building, and several women, one of them pregnant, were dragged out of the building with two private security guards on one side and two policemen on the other. The possibility of a late prosecution is only now being considered, on the initiative of some support members rather than the union.
A striking impression from the meeting and previous developments is that the workers, far from being genuinely empowered by the strike, remained utterly dependent on the T&G - cut off from playing any real role in the negotiations that have taken place, given almost no information, scared, humiliated, bullied and demoralised.
With the “revolutionary” organisations largely taking a spectatorial attitude, the workers were essentially left on their own after the initial euphoria. If only they were the “militant troublemakers”, an accusation which T&G representatives felt a need to promptly deny.
But the issue of secondary strikes is really crucial here. Experienced or inexperienced, it is hopeless to defy the Goliaths of concentrated Capital alone.
The Texas Pacific group, owner of Gate Gourmet and famous for its union busting policies, also controls many other companies such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc, United Artists, Continental Airlines and Burger King (there’s a great opportunity for putting pressure on the Texas Pacific group -  http://www.sackedbygategourmet.org.uk/support.htm), whose new Chief Financial Advisor, Cedric Burgher, is the former Vice President of Enron and former Treasurer of Halliburton (It is also interesting to note that David Bonderman, founding partner of Texas Pacific and also Chairman of Ryanair airline, “made the news recently when it was discovered that he had spent $10 million on his 60th birthday party in Las Vegas. Bonderman splashed out for his 500 or so guests by hiring Robin Williams the comedian as warm up entertainment followed by the Rolling Stones, all this, while his workers at Gate Gourmet were living on £6 an hour.”).
A temporary alternative to secondary strikes, smaller and less potent, but always attractive for its confidence-boosting and libertarian potential, are “flying squads” (on the concept see for example Jeff Schantz, Developing Workers Autonomy: An Anarchist Look At Flying Squads -  http://nefac.net/node/915). The frustrating inefficiency of the Gate Gourmet support network, in a dispute which began so vibrantly, reaffirms the need for establishing flying squads/pickets in London and other centres, big and small.
In the course of the Gate Gourmet meeting, a letter of support from a major left-wing Indian trade union was read, also reporting on the substantial on-going Indian struggles against privatisation, 3000 workers injured in a police attack, security workers in Delhi fighting the sackings by a British company, and strike action which closed Indian airports... On a yet higher level, the most powerful response to the globalisation of capital would be globalisation of integrated workers’ resistance, something which the Left, still caught up in social-democratic nostalgia or just statist approaches (This includes libertarians organised on a narrow-minded national model!), has so far dangerously neglected. A future offensive strategy will also necessitate finding the main arteries connecting the struggles and striking at those critical points of the transnational capitalist system.


 http://sackedbygategourmet.org.uk
South Asia Solidarity Group
 sasg@southasiasolidarity.org 020 7267 0923

Donations to support the strikers can be sent to the Gate Gourmet Hardship Fund, c/o Mr E. McDermott, Regional Secretary,
TGWU, 218 Green Lanes, London N4 2HB
(please make cheques payable to Transport & Geberal Worker’ Union and write ‘Gate Gourmet’ on the reverse)