Gate Gourmet deal means only 187 of 713 workers reinstated
Under pressure from TGWU officials - who had announced to the press, before consulting the union members, that they had a deal - the locked-out Gate Gourmet workers have accepted a deal which loses most of their jobs and sees the union activists sacked.
The Financial Times (29 September) reports: Under the deal, 397 of the 713 sacked workers will be given the option of having their job back or accepting compensation. Some 210 of these have previously signalled that they might accept the compensation package...
Another 172 workers... have definitely indicated they would not return to work and would accept compensation.
This leaves 144 dismissed workers, who will be classed as compulsorily redundant... includ[ing] a list of fewer than 10 workers whom the company did not wish to take back [because they are union activists]".
The FT report is silent on the terms and conditions for the minority of workers who will get their jobs back. The initial lock-out was provoked by Gate Gourmet bosses bringing in 130 casual workers after a long period in which they had been pressing for cuts in jobs and conditions.
This settlement is not a matter of retrieving a few concessions out of unavoidable defeat. At the time of the deal, Gate Gourmet's scab labour was still unable to supply BA with airline meals for a big proportion of its flights.
A solidarity strike by BA baggage handlers at the start of the dispute quickly led BA to demand that Gate Gourmet sort out the dispute.
If that solidarity strike had been continued (it was illegal, of course, but this was an excellent test case for unions to defy the law with mass public sympathy)... if the TGWU had organised effective solidarity action by ballotting other groups of workers at Heathrow on their own issues of pay and conditions... if other unions at Heathrow had done the same... if, on the basis of that action, the British unions had appeal for solidarity to airline and airport unions worldwide... if the TGWU had responded to BA victimising three of the striking baggage-handlers by immediately balloting for action... if, in short, the unions had a leadership willing to fight.... if the supposedly "left" and "awkward squad" union leaders, like the TGWU's Tony Woodley, were not as weak as water... then the Gate Gourmet workers would have won, and a big blow would have been struck against the whole global-capitalist policy of outsourcing, contracting-out, casualisation, and union-busting.
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