There are two remarkable features about the BA/Gate Gourmet strikes that erupted last month and continue as the predominantly Asian women workers fight a determined and energetic battle for reinstatement.
The first is the fact that a sacking of low-paid catering workers preparing in-flight meals was met with solidarity action by BA baggage handlers, bus drivers and check in staff - an action that closed down BA at huge cost and disrupted its operations for more than a week. This was illegal under the Tory/New Labour antiunion laws, and the first such action in Britain since the 1980s.
This is an advanced form of action and although BA drivers and baggage handlers have huge industrial muscle with which to defend themselves the strike was undertaken at a serious risk to their own jobs at the hands of BA.
Indeed they are now in BA disciplinary procedure over it - though whether BA will risk another confrontation with them is another matter.
The second is the tremendous tenacity and solidarity of the 770 Gate Gourmet workers themselves, first in resisting a degradation of their working conditions and then in standing together in the face of dismissal. This ise partly because they were unionised workforce, which is unusual amongst low-paid workers these days.
They are also a workforce that overwhelmingly Punjabi women, and Asian
seem to have a remarkable capacity for resisting employers and defending their rights.
The tenacious Hillingdon Hospital strikers spring to mind. They were UNISON members sacked in 1995 and won full reinstatement and compensation after three years of struggle. There was also the epic two year struggle Grunwick strikers of in the mid 1970s who were predominantly Asian women from East Africa.
The task in front of the movement today is to ensure that the battle that is shaping up at Gate Gourmet is fought to a successful conclusion and is concluded in weeks or months and not years.
The dispute is a direct result of the neo-liberal drive for privatisation in the 1990s. Gate Gourmet, an international union busting company took the contract after BA outsourced its catering services - the result It is not just the framework of the
neo-liberal
offensive that makes this strike political. There was the issue of the anti-union laws - against which the unions once
again had no
answer. unsurprisingly was assault on the wages and working conditions of the workforce. Gate Gourmet workers quickly became typical of the low-paid highly exploited section of the British economy.
By the time the strike took place the T&G had been in negotiations with Gate Gourmet over redundancy and working conditions for over a year. Numerous proposed deals had been rejected by the workforce.
A deal was eventually imposed by management, no doubt with the tacit agreement of BA. The workers resisted and the sackings took place mostly by megaphone and some by courier.
It soon emerged - as T&G General Secretary Tony Woodley pointed out - that Gate Gourmet management had planned the whole thing, aiming to provoke a strike, sack the workforce, engage a new one and thus avoid the costs of redundancy payments, pensions, and other liabilities.
The task now is to make the Gate Gourmet workers a rallying point for everyone who is sick and tired of the low pay, high exploitation, and no security type of employment that Gate Gourmet management represent.
The best opportunity of winning the strike of course was in the wake of the solidarity action that had such a massive effect on BA. At this point the whip was in the hands of the unions.
That strength was decimated, however, with the decision to go to ACAS and begin discussions on wages and conditions without the issue of reinstatement being resolved. Once BA got back to normal some of the pressure was off of management to settle.
The reinstatement of the sacked workers should have been a bottom line without which no discussions could take place.
But it is not just the framework of the neo-liberal offensive that makes this strike political. There was the issue of the anti-union laws - against which the
It is tied up with the political nature of new Labour and its relationship to the trade union movement. Confronting these laws is not something that can be left to the time when a dispute breaks out.
Nor is confronting them compatible with defending new Labour in the way Woodley consistently does, canvassing for it, and calling for an automatic vote for it when a general election comes around. Put another way, the battle against the anti-union laws, which are fundamental to the decline of the trade union movement which we have seen for the past 20 years, are tied up as much with the development of a political alternative to new Labour as it is with developing a response by the trade unions themselves.