IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
Solidarity will have to be legalised
Posted to the IUF website 10-Sep-2005Share this article.
Solidarity is the best way to level the industrial relations playing field, heavily tilted as it is in favour of employers against workers.
That is a clear lesson to be learned from last week's disruption at Heathrow Airport.
The action taken by British Airways employees in support of the workers sacked by the Gate Gourmet catering firm was unlawful, and was repudiated by the T&G.
Everyone must regret the misery caused to many passengers - but the buck for the disruption firmly stops with Gate Gourmet's managers, whose cynical plot to get rid of their workforce provoked this confrontation.
I sympathise with the view attributed to one member of the travelling public that it is better to have a disrupted holiday than to be summarily sacked.
The question that needs to be addressed is - why should solidarity action be illegal? Elsewhere in Europe, where labour law conforms to the International Labour Organisation conventions, it is not.
Britain, despite being a signatory to the ILO convention, flouts those provisions which recognise that supportive action has a proper role to play.
This is not to argue in favour of the sort of "wildcat" action taken last Thursday. But I believe that it is time to bring solidarity action within the framework of the law - define its legitimate scope and make it subject to the same regulations on balloting and notice which regulate other industrial disputes at present.
For too long employers have been able to take advantage of a lop-sided legal framework which makes securing justice for even the most exploited workers hugely difficult. The current dispute illustrates some of the difficulties.
It has now emerged that Gate Gourmet secretly planned for over a year to get rid of its unionised workforce. A scheme to provoke employees into a strike was carefully hatched, on the principle that sacking is cheaper than redundancy payments.
One of the company's directors established a labour sub-contracting firm to supply a replacement - and cheaper - workforce; the sort of "gangmaster" operation which has led to such abuse of migrant workers elsewhere.
And the workers themselves finally saw their jobs dispatched by means of a megaphone announcement. Those off sick and on holiday were likewise fired, although the company appears to have retreated on this outrage.
Some of this may be open to legal challenge, but most of it appears to be within employment law, as laid down in the Thatcher years and kept in place to this day.
The dispute also highlights the iniquities of the contracting-out culture that has gripped many British businesses. Gate Gourmet was BA's in-house catering arm until the company decided to sell it off in 1997.
BA has since used its muscle to attempt to impose cuts on the contractor which it could never have contemplated when it ran the business itself.
It has sought an enormous �50 million plus reduction in catering costs over the duration of the contract, with year-on-year productivity improvements of three per cent.
Incredibly, the contract makes no allowance for even the most modest inflation-linked increase in wage costs over the years since 1997. And this from a company presently making record profits.
It is not to excuse Gate Gourmet's management to point out that this irresponsible contracting-out, with little object in mind other than cutting labour costs, is bound to stir up strife.
Most BA workers still regard Gate Gourmet employees as part of "the family", with considerable justice - the great bulk of the catering company's work is done for their airline, with contracting-out more a legal nicety than an operating reality.
All of these issues have been ignored in much of the predictable anti-union huffing and puffing we have heard over the last few days. Barry Sheerman's ill-informed comments were a particular disappointment, coming as they did from a Labour MP.
He appeared to have not a thought for the Gate Gourmet workers - mainly Asian women earning just �12,000-a-year sacked in an instant. And his suggestion that the dispute was deliberately targeted by the workforce for August would be laughable were the situation not so serious.
The timing of this crisis is entirely down to Gate Gourmet's management, which sacked hundreds of workers at a moment's notice. Happily, all those Labour MPs in the Heathrow area have recognised this and been very supportive.
Solidarity among workers facing adversity is as natural as breathing. It is the very foundation stone of the labour movement. Of course, it needs to be exercised responsibly.
But the treatment of our members at Gate Gourmet is the clearest signal that the law has to change. It must take account of the iniquitous consequences of sometimes bogus "contracting-out" by big business. It should ban the crude union-busting techniques of Gate Gourmet bosses - an abuse of process if ever there was one.
And, above all, it should recognise the impulse to solidarity - "secondary action" in the jargon - by bringing it within the scope of the law.
Criminalising those who acted in support of exploited Asian workers brutally sacked last week, and their union, is not only wrong in principle - it is also the route to still worse workplace relations.
Published in the British newspaper The Guardian on 16 August 2005