‘Recruit, train and security check drivers…Announce intention to trade union, provoking unofficial industrial action from staff. Dismiss current workforce. Replace with new staff.’
With brutal frankness, this leaked internal memo from Gate Gourmet, written long prior to the current dispute, sets out the cynical and callous reality of 21st century employment practice under capitalism.
Gate Gourmet provides 80,000 hot meals to British Airways daily. Previously part of British Airways before being sold off in 1997 during a frenzy of ‘outsourcing’, it was subsequently bought out in 2002 by US venture capitalist firm Texas Pacific, which has a reputation for acquiring failing companies and cutting costs through ruthlessly increasing the surplus value extracted from already low-paid workers.
On the morning of 10 August, Gate Gourmet workers assembled in the workplace cafeteria to discuss the company’s decision to hire 120 new low-paid temporary workers from scab labour firm Blue Arrow. Whilst union representatives from the Transport & General Workers Union (T&GWU) were engaged in talks with Gate Gourmet managers over this development, it was suddenly announced to staff that they had three minutes to return to work or they would be fired. The workers refused to be intimidated by the threat and stood their ground. Almost immediately riot police and private security firms arrived, detaining the workers in the cafeteria, thus clearly revealing the premeditated nature of the provocation. No one was allowed to leave, not even pregnant women.
Those arriving for the late shift, on hearing this news, refused to enter work, assembling instead in the car-park. Management consequently proceeded to announce the sacking of workers through a barely audible megaphone announcement. When asked for written clarification, a note was passed to the workers which stated they had ten minutes to return to work or they would lose their jobs, but that the ten-minute period was already over. By the end of the day, 800 workers were left unemployed.
If more proof of the calculated actions of Gate Gourmet in engineering the unofficial action was needed, extra workers were ready to be bussed in to replace those sacked and companies trading with Gate Gourmet were warned the previous day that a dispute would occur.
Following the years of oppressive Conservative governments, the British trade unions remain the most impotent in Europe, with eight years of a Labour government refusing to repeal the vast majority of the anti-union legislation introduced in the 1980s. This is partly what allowed Gate Gourmet to operate such callous practices with such impunity.
However, the following day, 11 August, up to one thousand ground staff employed by British Airways at Heathrow Airport took unofficial strike action in solidarity with the sacked Gate Gourmet workers. The solidarity strike crippled BA for two days, costing the airline an estimated £40 million, with chaos ensuing at Heathrow, one of the world’s busiest airports.
The strike put both BA and Gate Gourmet under enormous pressure, with the balance of forces at this point clearly favouring the workers. It was only the betrayal of the strike by the T&GWU that allowed the situation to be defused. In fact, the union’s first action was to condemn the strike as illegal and demand its members return to work. Tony Woodley, T&GWU leader, wrote in a letter to BA in reference to the action that ‘We do not condone what happened last week and we took appropriate steps to end the unofficial action.’ The T&GWU bureaucracy clearly saw the need to protect its own privileges, its own ‘partnership’ with numerous other British corporations, as primary to protecting the interests of the low-paid workers it is supposed to represent.
Once the secondary action at Heathrow had been betrayed, the poorly-paid, largely Asian workforce of Gate Gourmet was reduced to a valiant but largely ineffective picket of Gate Gourmet headquarters. And even this has been attacked: on 13 September the High Court ruled that the picket be manned by no more than six workers, after Gate Gourmet brought charges of intimidation against the protesting workers.
On 25 August T&GWU and Gate Gourmet, after days of negotiation, agreed on a deal. The result: 670 jobs lost and the catering company claiming it has won the right to refuse to re-employ 200 ‘militants’. The T&GWU claims the agreement reached as a package of ‘voluntary redundancies’. This, however, is nothing but a smokescreen to cover the dire situation in which the union has left the Gate Gourmet workers: ‘to take a minimal package of compensation or remain isolated and penniless until they finally leave with nothing’. Furthermore, striking workers have received no strike pay for the last month.
The whole Gate Gourmet fiasco has shown-up the ruling class for what it truly is, and the depths its apologists in the trade union movement are willing to sink to defend it. m
Joseph Eskovitchl
FRFI 187 October / November 2005
