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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Holiday Special

by New Worker correspondent

As the holiday season is upon us it is appropriate to take a look at workers involved in the tourist and travel businesses at home and abroad.

The transport sector has strong unions on the railways, buses and airports. Pilots are well represented by the British Airline Pilots Association, which has secured healthy wage packets. But other parts of the tourist industry are not so fortunate. As demonstrated once again by the P&O ferries sackings two years ago, unions in the shipping industry remain very weak despite more than a century of activity. Employers are still able to replace union-rate workers with those willing to work for much less.

At home, the hotel industry is traditionally low-paid and largely non-unionised. With workers often having to live on the job, industrial action is virtually ruled out. Large multinational chains are just as hostile to unions as the proverbial Blackpool landlady. Students eager for a summer job to keep down future student loan repayments down are not terribly interested in the long-term rewards for changing sheets during the summer break. Unite has a Hospitality section and the GMB also organises, or at least pretends to organise, in the sector. In the latter case this means GMB collecting membership fees from the bosses so that hotels can claim to be unionised to get the stamp of approval for trade union conferences.

Going on Holiday

Monday saw over 4,600 workers at Gatwick Airport secure an average 8.3 per cent rise. Workers employed by 11 different companies include 400 Wilson James passenger assistance workers, who had voted to strike won a 10.5 per cent rise. ICTS baggage screening workers got 11 per cent; 1,900 directly employed Gatwick employees secured a £900 award on top of an eight per cent increase; 1,100 DHL EasyJet workers won 9.8 per cent. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham said: “As these phenomenal results show, Unite is reversing the trend of jobs at Gatwick being underpaid and undervalued. Unite is achieving this by organising workers at Gatwick and relentlessly focusing on improving jobs, pay and conditions.”

Regional officer Dominic Rothwell added: “Unite’s work at Gatwick shows why it is the union for the UK’s airport and aviation workers. Workers who want better wages and working lives should join Unite and get their colleagues to do the same.”

At a slightly smaller airport, Inverness, Unite has also won an improved deal for over 20 employed by Skytanking as “front-of-house” customer service agents, who got a 7.75 per rise or £1.00 extra per hour. The deal also includes an increase in shift allowances that equals a 29.6 per cent rise, plus an extra day’s holiday and double time at Christmas and New Year.

Regional industrial officer Marc Jackson said: “Unite held successful negotiations with Skytanking at Inverness airport to ensure our members got a significant boost to their take-home pay. It’s a deal we are pleased to have got over the line on behalf of our members.”

This is only the latest in a number of victories at Scottish airports, which at least go some way to help offset pandemic era reductions and redundancies. These include: 12.8 per cent for ICTS workers at Aberdeen and Glasgow, 12 per cent basic increase in pay for Edinburgh Airport Services workers and 11.9 for 100 OCS at the same airport.

On the railways no further strikes are planned but the end of last month saw Avanti West Coast caterers take two days of strike action over imposed unreasonable rosters. The outsourced workers face short notice changes to shifts, job cuts, and enforced overtime, impacting their ability to plan family commitments and attend medical appointments.

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said: “Avanti West Coast’s chaotic management has left staff unable to plan their lives, creating unacceptable stress and fatigue. Our members, who deliver crucial on-board catering services, have endured continuous job reductions, unpredictable work hours, and mandatory overtime.”

Low Pay Yet Again

In the hospitality industry Unite has launched a “Fair Pay and Fair Tips” campaign that aims “to ensure that workers in the lowest paid sector receive fair pay and fair tips”. This modest objective is necessary despite new legislation coming into effect on 1st October.

It will name and shame rogue employers who try to ignore or distort the new legislation. Others will attempt to include tips in wages to boost their profits.

The Employment (Fair Allocation of Tips) Act 2023 covers four million workers who receive tips or service charges. It obliges bosses to hand over 100 per cent of all tips. It also allows workers to take their employer to a tribunal for failure to ensure fair tips within 12 months of the breach. The tribunal will be able to order the re-allocation of tips plus up to £5,000 compensation for each worker impacted.

Sharon Graham warned that “if employers think they can continue to get away with failing to give workers their tips or docking their pay they need to think again. Unite will use every avenue to ensure our members secure pay and tip justice”.

We have, of course, heard that before. For instance, in 2018, Unite Hospitality members at TGI Fridays needed a strike to win a fairer tips policy. More recently, in 2022, workers at the Cameron House Hotel on Loch Lomond won back £138,000 in unpaid tips and service charges when it was discovered that their employer had not been transparent or fair with distribution.

The union also makes the hardly revolutionary point that workers should be paid enough so that they don’t need to rely on tips to make ends meet and that they should receive 100 per cent of any gratuity without any employer deductions, that they are distributed equitably according to job role and determined by democratically elected workplace committees.

Gold Medals for Striking

Good timing is often the key to successful industrial action. This has been demonstrated by two recent actions in Paris. Workers at a five-star hotel where members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are staying walked out the day before the opening ceremony.

The Hôtel du Collectionneur collected £18.5 million for exclusive use of the facility for the IOC biggies. The hotel paid out an eight million pound dividend last year but only offered a two per cent pay rise and refused to pay the customary French “13th month” bonus.

Workers mounted a demonstration lining the corridors with signs reading “luxury hotel, poverty wages” and “Give us back our social benefits”. Their union, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), said workers had not had a rise in seven years.

Workers at Paris airports also threatened strike action just before the Games, a move which forced bosses to cough up an improved pay offer that saw workers securing bonuses for all that had originally only been offered to a select few.

In Australia journalists employed by Nine Entertainment’s, the media giant which has the country’s monopoly for Olympic broadcasting, took strike action for the first five days of the games that greatly affected coverage on such papers as the Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Times. Staff had previously rejected a 2.5 per cent pay rise.

Selling the Family Silver

London’s Great Russell Street is the address of two major institutions: the British Museum and the TUC HQ, Congress House. But not for much longer. While the classical 19th Century Museum is staying put the 1950s modernist Congress House is up for sale.

This little noticed decision is a damning reflection on the state of Britain’s trade unions, which now represent less than a quarter (22 per cent to be precise) of the workforce.

After the TUC’s Finance Committee decided it is no longer viable to keep the building, its General Council agreed that point in early June. It is claimed that essential refurbishment will cost around £20 million.

Congress House was opened in 1958, some 14 years after the 1944 TUC called for a new building. It is the grandest purpose-built labour movement building in Britain, although the nearby British Medical Association’s Tavistock House and the National Education Union’s Hamilton House are equally impressive.

In 1946 David Du Roi Aberdeen won the design competition against 180 rivals, but it was not until 1958 the building finally opened.

The competition brief was to provide a building that would be “fitting to the dignity and propagation of the great ideals for which the Movement stands”.

It is centred on a large semi-basement conference hall surrounded with offices and smaller meeting rooms. It had a library (now at the University of North London), a catering hall, and a well-lit entrance hall. The panelled rooms are the result of timber donated by unions from across the globe. All the construction workers had to have a union card. As the TUC is very respectable, the Royal Horse Guards played at the opening ceremony.

Modernist architecture is not to everybody’s taste, being rather plain, but the building has important unique features. Its internal courtyard is dominated by Sir Jacob Epstein’s 1957 sculpture of a mother carrying her dead son, a striking anti-war monument. This was designed specifically for the building. At the front, the plain Cornish granite slabs frontage looks down on the bronze “Spirit of Brotherhood” statue of a strong man helping a weak one, by communist sculptor Bernard Meadows. Being a Grade II listed building such important features will have to be retained, which certainly will put off buyers. A mysterious Ministry of Defence building at the back enabled the spooks to know what was going on.

The TUC claims it needs a “modern fit-for-purpose” building. But this is something that they already have. It is near to three major railway stations connected to the north of Britain. The building is used by other trade unionists. As a humble trades union council delegate, this correspondent recalls sitting in the top floor council chamber listening to both fiery and long-winded speeches.

Parts of the building are already rented out to sympathetic bodies such as law firm Thompsons. Its large hall has been rented out to all and sundry including for large company AGMs, which bring in cash, albeit at the cost of generating controversy.

Forty jobs, largely of catering workers, are at risk from the TUC’s planned move. TUC General Secretary Paul Nowack said the decision was “an incredibly difficult one” but was in the movement’s best interests.

In some respects this is like a 20-strong congregation struggling to keep a Victorian church built for hundreds water-tight. But things are not as bad as that for the TUC. Given its location, the TUC could clearly do more to exploit the building rather than simply throw in the towel, even if that meant hiring its soul for corporate AGMs. The alternative will likely be a suite of offices occupying a couple of floors in an expensive nearby office block.

The planned sell-off is definitely a retreat at a time when trade unions need to go on the offensive. There is a petition against the sale, focussing on the risk of lost jobs, at: https://www. change.org/p/save-congresshouse-jobs