Mass Sackings and Wildcat Strikes at Heathrow

On August 10, existing employees of the airline caterer Gate Gourmet, based at Heathrow, found that new seasonal workers had been hired. They were surprised and upset that the company had made this unilateral move because they knew their trade union, the T & G, was currently in negotiations with the management about proposed redundancies. So what on earth was going on? While union reps responded to this clear provocation by seeking an explanation from the management, workers assembled in the canteen for a meeting. A management spokesman then suddenly appeared and told workers they had 20 minutes to get back to work or they would be sacked. They refused and remained in the building. Workers starting the late shift also refused to come into work having heard the news. Those assembled in the car park would then hear a muffled megaphone announcement from the management and later find they were sacked. This was then confirmed in a pre-prepared note which was handed out to them.

Six hundred and seventy workers, mainly women from the Sikh communities of Southall, were now without a job. The insecurity which is the lot of every worker had become an all too painful reality. Fellow workers turning up the next day were faced with the ultimatum of signing a new contract which would slash pay and conditions or face the sack as well. Considering the wage of Gate Gourmet catering assistants is a derisory £12,000 per year, any reduction was bound to be resisted as a matter of necessity.

The next day the sacked workers declared on their union website that the whole situation had been contrived by the company and prepared for many months in advance. Indeed, the evidence for this is overwhelming: dismissal letters had been prepared beforehand and sent to all staff, whether they were on leave or sick; an outside security company had been hired; the police had been alerted, and indeed Gate Gourmet had previously informed the companies they trade with that there was going to be a dispute.

And why this elaborate charade? Because the company wanted to sack the workers without paying them any redundancy pay, and introduce lower paid workers on short-term contracts.

The current situation goes back to the failed negotiations in June of this year. At that time the T & G was in the process of negotiating a ‘rescue package’ with the company which included redundancies. The union argued that if these were to take place, they would have to be across the board and include management. The company’s smug response was to re-grade 147 shop-floor workers, earning around £14,000 per annum, as managers and then make them redundant. The workers were then told that managers’ starting salaries in the company’s proposed new structure would be higher than before, with the lowest grade paying £18,000 as opposed to £14,000 and other starting salaries being raised to £22,000 and £28,000. This was the final straw. The ‘rescue package’ was rejected by a margin of 9 to 1. As negotiations foundered, the company then announced it was to employ 120 additional temporary staff, and the unilateral introduction of these new staff would be the spark which would ignite the dispute.

On August 11, on the day after the mass sackings, 1,000 British Airways baggage handlers and loaders represented by the same union as the catering staff came out in sympathy. Then another union, representing British Airways check-in staff, advised their members to stop work for health and safety reasons after disgruntled passengers took out their frustrations on their members.

This immediate solidarity was due to the BA workers belonging to the same union, and the fact that the sacked workers used to be employed by BA when it ran its own catering operation. There were also strong family links between the two groups: many of the striking BA staff were sons and husbands of the striking women.

The inevitable resulting chaos for airline passengers has been reported in such tedious and exhaustive detail that we won’t dwell on it here. Suffice to say that the media could have given more airtime to the traveller who commented that it is better to have a disrupted holiday than be summarily sacked. But even that relatively innocuous comment would have been far too controversial, of course.

Since the start of the dispute, the sacked staff have been staging daily demonstrations outside the entrance to Gate Gourmet’s Heathrow headquarters and on a verge called Beacon Hill about 500 yards away. Emotions are understandably running high: the police have been called in to investigate allegations that one of the Gate Gourmet workers still at work had been head-butted; a Times reporter spotted six armed policemen chasing three middle-aged women in saris across the car park.

With the State so clearly on the side of the employers, it is no surprise that Gate Gourmet have already been awarded an injunction by the High Court limiting the number of people that could picket outside its main entrance to six. The injunction has also named 17 people who have been accused of harassment and intimidation. The T & G has also been made legally responsible for the pickets’ behaviour.

The union’s role in this dispute has been to curtail the spontaneous acts of solidarity, and try and get back to the negotiating table as quickly as possible. Accordingly on August 11, the company and union agreed to discussions, via the use of ACAS, and the T & G went in to successfully head off the BA workers wildcat strike. By August 16, talks had already stalled over the refusal of Gate Gourmet to reinstate the sacked workers. In the words of the company chairman: “The hardliners and militants are never coming back”. This is the main sticking point.

At this point the T & G called on BA to play “a part in the resolution of this issue”, whilst adeptly trying to regain a bit of militant gloss by condemning BA for victimising their wildcat strikers.

British Airways has about 550 flights a day in and out of its main hub, Heathrow, carrying around 100,000 passengers. It is Gate Gourmet’s main customer. The latter is the 2^nd largest catering company in the world and provides BA at Heathrow with 36,000 in-flight meals a day. According to a BA spokesman, Gate Gourmet is the only company large enough to cater for its needs. It’s destiny is therefore inextricably linked to it. Thus, in the present dispute, BA has concentrated on trying to bail out Gate Gourmet. By August 16, BA had already signed a new deal with Gate Gourmet reported to involve a two-year extension to the current contract at a better price, but dependent on labour issues being resolved.

But BA doesn’t want to get too involved. It knows it has to tread carefully with the unions because it will need them to approve the redundancies it is planning when the new terminal 5 opens. And this isn’t the first wildcat strike BA has had, in July 2003 there was one in protest against the introduction of a new electronic clocking-on system.

So Gate Gourmet probably won’t succeed in getting BA to take its side, or not in a high profile way in any case. BA has just decided to dangle a bit of cash in front of Gate Gourmet as an incentive to ‘get things back to normal’.

And Gate Gourmet’s problems aren’t confined to Heathrow. In America, unions representing their employees successfully sued to get their health benefits restored after the company tried to eliminate them, and it hasn’t exactly distinguished itself in an operational sense either. In February, the Food and Drug Administration cited its Hawaii plant for health violations, including mould in the refrigerators and vermin. In England, Virgin Atlantic switched to another caterer after its inspectors uncovered hazards such as dirty floors with puddles “attracting flies” and blocked sinks etc. The Herald Tribune reports that several passengers from flights it served this summer are suing, claiming for food poisoning.

On August 28, Gate Gourmet outlined the redundancy terms it hopes will end the dispute. Staff taking voluntary redundancy would receive two weeks’ pay for each year of service, more than twice the statutory minimum. Talks between Gate Gourmet and the union are due to restart once it is known how many of the 1,400 existing staff and how many of the 670 sacked workers are prepared to accept the redundancy offer.

What is unclear is what will happen if the “troublemakers” refuse to accept the offer, and who exactly are these ‘militants’ on the company’s hit list? Although only 17 workers were mentioned in the injunction, David Siegel, the global head of Gate Gourmet, has upped the number of workers he considers as “holding the company hostage” to 200!

What clearly emerges from this strike is the power of lightning strikes to strengthen the workers’ hand. The union seems to recognise this, and occasionally takes the rostrum to fulminate against restrictive labour legislation. But when direct action is taken, and the anti-strike laws are simply broken, they are very quick to condemn the perpetrators and retreat into defence of the Rule of Law. It is said the union didn’t step in to stop the wild-cat strike for 14 hours, thereby tacitly approving it. But why then were they so categorical in condemning the strike when they did step in? If it is the Law which lies in the way of workers’ solidarity, then the Law will have to be broken! That is what they should be saying, and that is what the wildcat strikers actually did.

The official unions, the T & G in this case, are far too integrated into the state apparatus to be able to put up a real fight. Even now, their previous leader sits recumbent in the House of Lords, no doubt reminiscing about his commie bashing exploits to gout-ridden millionaires; and helping himself to a pinch of parliamentary snuff every now and again. And part and parcel of being integrated into the capitalist state apparatus, the union is too integrated into the Labour Party: a party which has done nothing to overturn the anti-working class legislation introduced by the Conservative party. The Labour Party, condemned by Engels at its very inception, is a pro-capitalist party through to its very marrow, and the fact the union is funding it means they are part of that pro-capitalist axis.

And even if the union, in the most generous of hypotheses, did collaborate with the wildcat strikers for 14 hours, and this is difficult to prove, finding little anomalies in the Laws is not going to be enough. Working class demands can only be established by force. All Laws do is record the balance of forces as they exist at the time. And the same goes for negotiations. Therefore, when the T & G disarms the workers, by depriving them of the arm of unofficial action, they effectively weaken the workers bargaining position, and end up with less for the workers in the final negotiated agreement. To stress the importance of the union having a squeaky clean record of abiding by the law, to enhance the workers’ bargaining position, is therefore a nonsense.

But all the unions have done in any case is to tail behind the workers. It is amongst the wildcat strikers that the seeds of the future class conscious union movement lie.

The fact that a wildcat action has taken place means there must already be an organisation and leadership which is capable of defying the anti-strike laws and creating that solidarity between workers in different sectors which is of such crucial importance; not only for the fighting of the immediate economic battles of the working class, but as a way of forging that wider class consciousness which will be needed to fight the bigger battles which lay ahead.

Unfortunately we do not know exactly how the solidarity strike broke out (due as much to the workers concerned needing to protect themselves from being sacked as it is due to the media’s reluctance to report, and their lack of interest in, such matters). We nevertheless extend our solidarity to them, and to the sacked workers, and urge them to preserve the organisation and links between them which have developed during the course of the recent events… even if in opposition to the official union.