Tube cleaners in the RMT are preparing to ballot for strikes. Here, a cleaner tells Tubeworker why.

“Tube cleaners have been campaigning for many years against injustice. We’re fighting for dignity, and equal conditions in our workplaces. Currently we have no company sick pay, which means cleaners who get sick are forced to come to work or face financial hardship. And we also have no free travel passes, unlike directly-employed staff working on the railway. 

“The biggest demand we are fighting for is direct employment, for cleaning to be brought in house. I don’t consider myself an ABM cleaner. I am a TfL cleaner, I am a London Underground cleaner. ABM will probably go in a few years, some other contractor will come along. But we are doing the same work, cleaning London Underground. We should be employed directly.

“There’s hasn’t been industrial action for several years; union members amongst cleaners have been waiting for this dispute for a long time. People were asking, “when are we going to have a real fight?” Non-members have also been enthused by the announcement that we’re planning to ballot. Since the decision was announced, I’ve personally recruited six people. Cleaners want to join because they see us preparing for a strike. 

“We’re not planning to strike simply because we’re pissed off. Action is an essential organising tool. A union is only as strong as its membership. By taking action, we build the union. We need support and guidance from the rest of RMT. Many cleaners have English as a second language and many not know their legal rights. Some feel scared and isolated. The wider union can provide us with direction and information to help us build the dispute, and support us when we take action. We need to be honest with members about what it will take to win.

“We have been making good links with other unions organising cleaners, such as the IWGB. We have attend picket lines and demonstrations with them, and we’ve been sharing ideas and tactics at events coordinated by the New Economics Foundation. It’s good to meet cleaners from universities and hospitals and discuss what we have in common. We’re part of the union movement so should support each other. If they strike, they know RMT members will have their back, and vice versa. Our voice is bigger if we combine, so unions organising outsourced workers to demand direct employment should join together in common campaigns.”

This interview was originally published on the Worker’s Liberty blog, and can be found here.

With a growing number of disputes sparked by outsourcing public service jobs, George Binette, Hackney North CLP Trade Union Liaison Officer, reports on two union battles near the heart of Whitehall that highlight both the rotten reality of privatisation and a growing willingness to resist

THE END OF MAY (the month, not the ex-Prime Minister) brought a sliver of good news for union activists. Union membership across the UK rose by nearly 103,000 and the proportion of workers in unions also increased modestly to 23.4% in 2018, according to an annual report from the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). While the report offers no explanation for the slight recovery in union growth, it does indicate that it occurred exclusively in the public sector where membership was up by nearly 150,000. In fact, the number of union members among private sector employees actually fell again last year.

The dearth of regional and national strikes, especially more prolonged action involving large numbers of workers, has continued. There has, however, undoubtedly been a flurry of smaller disputes where outsourcing – either its consequences for workers’ pay and conditions, or the actual threat of it – has been the common denominator. A quick survey of union websites and the left press points to numerous protest actions and strikes involving workers employed by private contractors, which had taken over a range of ancillary services for public sector bodies. The list below is hardly exhaustive:

• Mitie has seen protests by GMB members over redundancies and other issues at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, southwest London, and strikes over low pay by Unite members on a facility management contract at the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant, owned by the privatised British Nuclear Fuels Limited
• NSL, Britain’s largest parking enforcement contractor, finally agreed significant concessions with Camden’s Unison-organised traffic wardens, who, after 33 strike days and protracted talks at ACAS, won a back-dated settlement that takes the minimum hourly rate to £11.48 from this April – 93p an hour above the current London Living Wage
• OCS, a major player in the market for cleaning and facility management contracts, conceded to workers’ demands at Liverpool Women’s Hospital after three strike days by Unison members, seeking parity with directly employed NHS staff
• ISS Mediclean agreed to implement NHS pay awards for outsourced staff at two other Liverpool hospitals, Broadgreen and the Royal Liverpool, after cleaners, porters and other manual workers, organised by Unite, threatened a series of strikes. In Liverpool and elsewhere there have also been protests organised by various branches of Unison, Unite and the GMB over the introduction of a detrimental payroll system by ISS.
• Sodexo, the French-based catering and facility management giant, conceded to similar demands from Unison-organised workers at Doncaster and Bassetlaw University Hospitals after the union members had struck for two days, and
• Princess Alexandra Hospital management in Harlow, Essex withdrew a proposal to outsource the jobs of some 200 domestics after the Unison membership had voted overwhelmingly to support an initial round of six days of strike action.

In a rich irony, two of the most bitter disputes – ultimately triggered by outsourcing – are at Government departments within easy walking distance of the Palace of Westminster. At the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), where a certain Jeremy Hunt is the relevant secretary of state, PCS member employed by the effectively bankrupt privateer, Interserve, have  staged a further week-long strike from 10^thJune, their third action in less than two months. The workers involved, a combination of cleaners, porters and engineering maintenance staff have fought back against management’s derecognition of the PCS, the failure to increase the hourly minimum wage to the current London Living Wage (LLW) rate of £10.55 as well as the implementation of a new payroll system that has left many staff without pay for up to six weeks.

The mid-June strike saw the launch of a food bank at the FCO to assist hard-pressed Interserve employees. The FCO food bank is the second to emerge at a Whitehall department this spring. The first was set up primarily for ISS employees at BEIS, the very department responsible for publishing the report on trade union membership cited above and the department ostensibly charged with ensuring basic employment standards across the economy. The MP for Tunbridge Wells, Greg Clark, is the acutely embarrassed secretary of state at BEIS, where ISS employees have endured a catalogue of payroll errors since the Danish-based multinational took over the facility management contract on 1^stMarch. 

These workers have now had more than enough and in a series of ballots voted nigh unanimously for strike action alongside the department’s catering staff, employed by Aramark, a US-based multinational, whose management claim the company can’t afford to pay the LLW on the basis of its current government contract. The Aramark workers had already staged several lively strikes, totalling 15 days so far this year, in pursuit of their demand for the LLW along with improved holiday and sick pay.

These strikes are of real importance for the PCS, especially in the wake of its inability thus far to overcome the 50% participation threshold in its recent industrial action ballot of more than 125,000 directly employed civil servants. The union has secured public support from Shadow Cabinet members with the likes of Diane Abbott, Rebecca Long-Bailey, John McDonnell and Laura Pidcock all visiting picket lines. As importantly the BEIS branch has begun forging links with local CLPs and particularly Hackney North, where Portuguese-born Ana, one of the Aramark workers, spoke powerfully to the May general meeting about the realities of scraping by in London while working full-time and taking home just £900 a month. The meeting responded with a collection of more than £270 and the CLP has gone to organise benefit raising at least £500.

In many respects, these workers – disproportionately women and often migrants – have paid the price for the failure of unions from the late 1980s onwards to mount effective resistance to the large-scale outsourcing and privatisation of ancillary jobs from the public sector. New Labour was, of course, utterly complicit in the aggressive promotion of an outsourcing model, which is now clearly broken even as tens of thousands continue to struggle with the day-to-day reality of poverty pay.

The determined resistance mounted by workers at BEIS, the FCO and elsewhere should serve as an inspiration to others to organise and fight back collectively, as well as encouraging Labour under Corbyn to bolster its commitment to end a privatisation regime that has provided taxpayer subsidised profits for the few, while eroding pay, terms and conditions for all too many.

We reported previously how activists from the Anti Raids Network blocked Home Office vans with snatch squads from leaving their depot at Eaton House in Hounslow. We also reported that Ali Tamlit of the Stansted 15 spoke to Brentford and Isleworth Labour Party on stopping the notorious deportation charter flights that result from such raids. Now even the Home Office has admitted that communities across the UK have had enough and are fighting back against these attacks

By the Labour Campaign for Free Movement 

Take a walk down the High Street and you can see people from all over the world live and work in the borough of Hounslow. But in recent years and in the European elections, the racist right has been gaining force, trying to persuade us that immigration is to blame for our problems. 

The Immigration Bill currently progressing through Parliament is a major attack on our rights. The Tories want to end the free movement of people between the UK and Europe, replacing our right to move, live and work across borders with harsh visa controls. They plan to class all migrant workers earning under £30,000 as “unskilled” and deny anyone the right to stay in the country longer than one year. 

The UK’s immigration regime already treats non-Europeans with violence and cruelty: detention centres; refugee deportations; NHS fees; and the “no recourse to public funds” policies that deny migrants access to the social safety net. Now Europeans too will face this same treatment. 

Free movement is about workers’ rights. The rich can always move where they want. It’s the rest of us whose freedom is under attack: particularly low-paid workers, as the income thresholds for different visas make clear. As highlighted by a recent study, a high proportion of gig economy and zero-hours workers are themselves immigrants. 

We are told that immigration controls protect British workers. But the evidence shows migration doesn’t reduce wages. It supports, not damages, public services. The real culprits behind low wages, zero-hour contracts and unemployment, the housing crisis, rip-off rents, and deteriorating services, are exploitative employers and landlords – and the governments that support them. 

So our best defence is not borders but solidarity: joining across divides of nationality, immigration status and frontiers to fight for our rights and our livelihoods. Anti-migrant politics and laws make that harder. They whip up hostility between British and migrant workers to divide and rule. If a migrant worker knows that if they lose their job he or she and their family can’t fall back on social security or might even be deported, then it’s harder to stand up against low pay and poor conditions. If this new law kicks migrant workers out after one year, it will be harder to build powerful trade unions and campaigns together. 

The Labour Campaign for Free Movement is a campaign by Labour supporters to argue within our movement, not just for defending free movement within Europe, but for further extending it and standing up for the rights of all migrants. 

We sum it up as: “Build Unions Not Borders!” To support us and get involved, see labourfreemovement.org, where you can also find details of our National Meeting on 7 July – see you there!

Issue 1 – 27th April 2019

Like Dickens said – or very nearly – it is the best of times, and the worst. As to the best bits, Labour has a strong anti-austerity message that has real resonance in working class communities. Polls (if you can trust them) are favourable, and there’s a good chance of coming to power with a radical agenda that can really change the lives of the vast majority for the better. 

Now for the bad news: working class organisation, both historically and typically expressed in terms of trade unions, are at historic lows. This disconnect between workers’ activity and the electoral success of left politics is a relatively new phenomenon, and is analysed here.

A welcome exception to this has been the collective action by some of the most exploited parts of the working class: what’s sometimes called the precariat; people frequently working zero hours jobs in what’s often called ‘McJobs’. Over recent months, they’ve fought back: Deliveroo and Uber Eats riders, Uber drivers, workers at McDonalds and TGI Fridays; cleaners at UCL… the list goes on. Many work in our borough, others live here. They’re part of our community.

Brentford and Isleworth Labour Party members have been inspired by these workers: many risking the little security they have to defend their pay and conditions. They’re often young and reflect the diversity of the people in this borough. We’ve had reps from TGI Fridays and Uber driver strikers to speak at our meetings, supported their days of action and passed resolutions in support of them. But we want to do more.

This is, not least, because so many workers in the borough have to contend with appalling working conditions. “Good news if you work in Barbican, less so in Hounslow Central” – that’s the byline for a unique London Underground map which uses the average wage in the vicinity of each tube station to compare earnings across the capital, showing the low wages people here face. This is despite our proximity to Heathrow Airport – indeed, a list of jobs being advertised there included just one at or above the London Living Wage.So, Brentford and Isleworth Labour Party decided to do this – launch a newsletter carrying news and analysis of these actions, to build support for them and keep party members informed of what’s happening in this new frontier of the union movement. It’s for local Labour party members, union activists – anyone who wants to know what’s happening in this area, is engaged in these struggles or wants to support them. 

Contact us with your thoughts on what we’re doing, if you’re involved and want the extra platform (we’d love to help) or want to get involved. We’re aiming to make this a monthly venture, but it’s very much dependent on the input we get from … well – you.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Uber Eats couriers fight back

Last autumn saw Hounslow Uber Eats couriers strike for three days against pay cuts along with colleagues across the UK. Later in the year couriers based at Hanworth McDonalds went on strike again against a further attack on their pay – read the full story in this interview with one of those involved.

A living wage for airport staff

Baggage handlers and check-in staff working for GH London (formerly Azzurra) at Heathrow Terminals 2 and 4 will strike from 26-29 April. They have suffered a six year pay freeze and seeking to secure a minimum pay rate of the London living wage. We encourage readers to support their picket lines. More info from their union Unite here

Defending migrant workers in Hounslow

Employers frequently use the vulnerable status of migrant workers as a further lever to suppress wages and undermine workplace conditions. Past and present, migrant workers have always faced the threat of immigration raids on their workplaces and homes. In Hounslow earlier this year activists from the Anti Raids Network blocked Home Office vans with snatch squads from leaving from their depot at Eaton House. Arrests can lead to deportation, and Brentford and Isleworth Labour Party recently heard from Ali Tamlit, one of the Stansted 15 protestors who faced anti-terrorism charges for stopping a deportation flight taking off.   

Southall remembered

April and May see a series of events  in Southall to mark the deaths of Gurdip Singh Chaggar and Blair Peach 40 years ago, the vibrant struggle against racism and fascism in the area then and its renewed relevance now. The events are organised by the Southall40 initiative and supported by a range of trade union and community organisations. One of the key events is the march against racism through Southall this Saturday 27 April (local shops are requested to close out of respect). 

Historic struggle 

Trico – A Victory to Remember is the tale of the epic 21-week equal pay strike at the Trico-Folberth car parts factory in Brentford in 1976. Written by ex-striker Sally Groves and Vernon Merritt it continues to garner thoughtful reviews from local history blogs  to activists in the West London factories of today. 

Car workers film   

On Friday 3 May in Greenford the Angry Workers group who have been documenting and agitating around working conditions in West London will be screening a premiere of “Air to Breathe” – a documentary about 40 years of trade union opposition at the Opel/General Motors car plant in Germany.

And finally…

1 May is International Workers Day, so why not join one of the activities on the day, such as the annual march and rally to Trafalgar Square or cleaners’ union CAIWU’s double decker bus tour of dispute hotspots?