LONDON: There are two views about the propriety of the way in which the Gate Gourmet employees — at the heart of the Heathrow disruption — behaved. One is that, by ‘withdrawing their labour’ before a strike ballot had been called, they broke the law. The other is that their canteen ‘sit-in’ was a legitimate protest against the company’s unlawful failure to tell them the truth about its plan to replace most of its full-time staff with casual labour. It seems unlikely that many of the unhappy families who slept on the floor of the departure lounge last Thursday night agonized unduly about the legal niceties of the dispute. However, some of them must have spent the weekend wondering if the unregulated labour market is such a good idea after all.
No doubt at some time during their ordeal they looked for someone to blame. But if they saw the television pictures of the sacked Gate Gourmet workers they would have found it hard to make the usual complaint about ‘trade-union bully boys’. The overwhelming majority of the strikers (or protesters) were Asian women — the lowest-paid and most exploited members of Britain’s workforce.
Such women are the cannon fodder of contract companies. They can be found cleaning hospitals, motorway service stations and airports all over the country. And — as in the case of Gate Gourmet — they work on similarly unattractive terms for catering companies that supply mass meals to the same sort of establishment. They do the worst jobs for the worst pay. The firms that employ them are the storm troopers of the competitive economy, the advance guard of market capitalism who only win contracts by cutting costs to the bone. The cost that is easiest to cut is labour.
Much to its credit, the Labour government has improved the contract employees’ lot. No matter how little they are paid, were it not for the statutory minimum wage they would be paid even less. And whatever employment protection they enjoy is equally the result of Labour-inspired legislation. But, despite all those advances, the sort of treatment that the Heathrow Gate Gourmet workers endured last week — dismissed on the most dubious of pretexts, with the announcement made through a bullhorn — is less common in Christian Democrat Europe than it is in New Labour Britain.
That is not because the employment protocols of the Maastricht social chapter offer explicit help to people such as the Gate Gourmet employees. It is because the ethos of labour relations in continental Europe makes it virtually inconceivable that a firm working for a great national company would treat its workforce in that way. The worst American habits have not yet infected the management of industry and commerce in continental Europe.
While low wages proliferate in contract catering and cleaning, so do millionaires.
The big, ‘respectable’ companies that farm out work to low-wage contract businesses are the Pharisees of the economy. Firms without national reputations to lose do the dirty work for them. This week’s stoppage has cost British Airways £40m, plus incalculable losses on future business.
Sensible people do not demand the repeal of all the ‘Tory labour laws’. But whether, in the words of the other cliche, it was ever essential ‘to do something about trade-union power’, it is certainly now necessary to curb the behaviour of employers who come to Britain because this country allows them to treat workers in a way that would not be tolerated on the continent. That is not a reputation of which we should be proud. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service