UPDATE - 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. At the same time 3 baggage handlers at Heathrow Airport who had taken part in a 1000-strong one-day sympathy strike are still suspended. According to the Gate Gourmet workers 'it is not over yet!'
Solidarity meetings this week:
Sacked Gate Gourmet Workers Website including:
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On Indymedia: Liverpool Blue Arrow demo | Manchester Blue Arrow demo | The secret casualisation plan | GG no stranger to industrial dispute | Angry Gate Gourmet workers lobby TUC
Also:Schnews report | Corporate Watch: A view from inside the Gate Gourmet dispute
Sacked Gate Gourmet workers demonstrate at Heathrow Airport
Background
What happened
On Wednesday, August 10th, 2005, Gate Gourmet sacked 670 workers employed at Heathrow. Fellow workers reporting for duty on Thursday 11th August were faced with the ultimatum of signing a new contract which would slash pay and conditions or face the sack. Workers were sacked by megaphone on the spot, and it became clear that people on holiday or even in hospital on sick leave had also been sacked.
It was later revealed that management had planned to provoke a confrontation and sack workers for almost a year. A plan costing £2.5 million was expected to save the company £6.5 million a year. Gate Gourmet deliberately provoked a confrontation to attack pay and conditions.
The workers' response
The Gate Gourmet workers themselves immediately began picketing both Heathrow airport and Gate Gourmet and called for solidarity from other workers. Around a thousand British Airways staff answered and went on unofficial strike at Heathrow airport. Gate Gourmet was forced back to the negotiating table, but is still stalling and issuing threats.
Why?
Gate Gourmet claim that the company must cut costs to survive, they claim that the sacked workers are endangering all jobs by 'making trouble' and refusing to cooperate. Their own behaviour proves this is rubbish. They provoked the confrontation, they refused to negotiate - only solidarity action from other workers forced them back to the table. The confrontation was provoked by bringing in workers from temp agencies, on lower pay, with fewer rights and with no protection against arbitrary sackings.
The factory is now being run by temporary workers, who are far easier for management to exploit and intimidate. The sacked workers earned between £12,000 and £16,000 a year, and this in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and yet even this was not low enough for Gate Gourmet who seek to use casual workers as an excuse to pay poverty wages and avoid any responsibility for pensions or sick pay.
Why Blue Arrow?
Blue Arrow are providing many of the temps who are being used to attack pay and conditions at Gate Gourmet. These are people on very low pay, with very few rights who are being put in a situation where simply by trying to survive they are complicit in an attack on other workers. It's not their fault, it's the fault of the cynical companies that manipulate and exploit people for their own profit.
Comments
Hide the following 9 comments
Thank you kindly Editors!
21.09.2005 14:13
Mr Spoon
Alternative View
21.09.2005 15:11
These people live in a prosperous part of the UK with jobs readily available, they should seek emloyment in a more environmentaly friendly industry.
Prefers to walk
whatever, girlfriend
22.09.2005 09:41
Back here on Planet Earth we'll get on with organising solidarity for low-paid exploited workers taking on a ruthless union-busting big business:
Mr Spoon
I agree
22.09.2005 11:54
The same for those who work for BAe, Lockheed Martin etc. Airlines fly because the staff agree to work there, if nobody worked for them they wouldn't fly. Don't think it doesn't work, Marlboro and other big fag companies have enourmous problems getting workers these days because people see it as unacceptable to work there.
HH
A worker is a worker !
22.09.2005 12:59
In the short term we campaign against arms companies like BAE Systems because they are operated for profit but once we have control and they are run for the benefit of the workers there is no reason why they shouldn't keep on making arms, the world will always need arms. It's the same with those working for airlines, although we would wish to see restrictions on airline travel and stop people using them for holidays etc. there will always be a requirement for Brothers and Sisters to visit other countries.
The issue here is not what the company does just the profit motive that drives them
Socialist
come down from your ivory towers
22.09.2005 13:02
I think showing soldarity with workers in the fossil-fuel industry, apart from being a commendable thing in itself, would be a great opportunity to forge links with workers in a fossil-fuel intensive industry rather than the endless and fruitless rounds of preaching to the converted, if you were to be strategically addressing the social change that needs to occur in order to deal with climate change.
And any social justice perspective of climate change has to acknowledge that many marginalised sections of society are forced into crappy, degrading jobs within the fossil-fuel indutsry through lack of opportunity. The line about "peopel should just go find less-environmentally harmful jobs" comes across as the perspective of someone who is in the materially and opportunistically priveleged position of being able to do so, and lacks a great deal of empathy as to the reality of people's day to day lives and situations.
kevvy-k
The problem is capitalism
23.09.2005 19:12
Prefers to Cycle
Support the sacked workers!
24.09.2005 22:31
The only way to solve climate change is to build a grassroots/rank and file movement strong enough to threated capitalism. This *cannot* be done without the workers - who occupy a structural location in capitalism which is particularly powerful. For evidence of this, look what happened when the BA workers walked out.
At the same time, we should be prepared to be honest with those we show solidarity with about our concerns. Not pushy, patronising or pre-emptive, but honest. We should seek to build social struggles which break down the boundaries between workers, particularly those taking industrial action, and activists working on broader issues. For instance, it seems to me that climate change activists and gate gourmet workers have a few short-term strategic interests in common right now... think about it.
elegiac
Incredible !
27.09.2005 12:08
"... most people aren't sufficiently politicised or knowledgeable.."
Has it occured to you that the reason the political Left finds it so hard to gain widespread support in this country is because, in part because of statements like that ?
My experience of working class people is that they are well aware of politics and are very knowledgable about the wider world, although perhaps they don't feel the need you do to try and proclaim their knowledge to the world.
Stop patronizing people and start working with them
Old fashioned Socialist