Peaky Blinding hypocrisy
The Peaky Blinders themed bar at Birmingham airport, an SSP (“food travel experts”) operated franchise, was recently given the FAB award for the “best airport bar in the world”.
These awards are supposedly the Oscars of airport food and drink, involving thousands of businesses worldwide. Ignoring the fact that this bar serves mediocre food, and drink at extortionate prices, this award was given on the backs of many cuts to workers by management.
The removal of free staff meals in particular is hard-felt, being replaced by a 75 percent discount, causing the average price of a meal to increase to £5 or £6.
This is increasingly unaffordable for part-time staff and unavoidable for the full-time staff who work 10-12 hours each day.
You work the first hour of the day paying for food and transport alone! With no time at home to meal prep due to the exhausting nature of the work and time constraints. There is only so much time in a day to prepare for work, work, recover and sleep.
This summer, the amount of staff pulled into work – which happens, incidentally, with only a week’s notice – is decreasing. At the same time the airport is at its busiest. This is the bosses’ tactic to reduce costs, implemented silently and gradually by the management.
Amidst plentiful amounts of labour and resources, the bosses are squeezing their workers to fill their own pockets – while simultaneously bragging about the success of their business, and how much money we make for them. It is barefaced hypocrisy.
Freddie Thorne, Birmingham
Organising in the mouth of the wolf
Since joining the party, one lesson has stood out to me: build where you work.
I am a barista in one of the biggest coffee companies in London. Since I started, I have seen discontent with low holiday allowance, no sick pay, and poor management.
In hospitality, fear of unionising is strong. I am the only one in a union, and my colleagues did not see the point.
Yet it took two months of patient conversations to turn frustration into action. One-to-one chats became open discussions on how to fight and win.
We met without management and agreed it would be us, the people on the floor, who decide what works for us, not management counting someone else’s profits. With our collective support, we convinced the assistant manager to organise a meeting with the store manager.
When the manager tried to brush off our points, we reminded her that her job depends on us. We won regular workers’ meetings, redistribution of responsibilities and a monthly discussion on industry topics with room for politics.
As a result of this organising, a colleague set up a subscription to the In Defence of Marxism magazine and The Communist, and copies will now be kept in the shop for everyone to read.
The lessons I have learned in the party through activity and political education have been essential to achieving this. In future, I will use this kind of report in The Communist to encourage them to write and have their say – and eventually, turn these small steps into an organised RCP cell in our workplace!
Especially where we don’t have a union, the revolutionary press and party remain key as a collective organiser for communists, and as a tool we can use to build across the industry.
Diego Rosslyn-Pimentel, Crystal Palace
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