Restaurant bosses and workers demonstrate

Submitted by AWL on 25 April, 2008 - 9:30 Author: Ed Maltby

On Sunday 20 Apr, the Bangladeshi Caterer’s Association (BCA) mobilised thousands for a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, calling for an end to raids on restaurants by the Border and Immigration Agency (BIA) and the regularisation of undocumented staff. The demonstration originated with restaurant workers and owners in China Town and spread to involving bosses and workers from other restaurants.

The demonstration reflected the politics of a cartel of small bosses. There were large numbers of restaurant workers in attendance, many of them surely chivvied along by their bosses (bosses shepherded small groups of their employees around the demonstration like schoolteachers), or drawn by communitarian loyalty (the demonstration had a heavily communitarian flavour, and the official materials stressed that the demands went no further than Bangladeshi-owned businesses).

There can be no doubt of the genuine anger and concern on the part of restaurant staff that the government’s racist and humiliating raids and attacks on migrant workers have aroused.

But fundamentally the demonstration was exclusively pushing a bosses’ agenda. Leaflets stated “We respect the government’s immigration policy, believing that it has been introduced in the national interest. But we are unable to understand why the government cannot find an initiative that will [allow us] to fill our kitchen vacancies with appropriate staff”. They objected to BIA raids on the grounds of staff shortages and disruption to business!

The first conclusion to be drawn here is that we must not allow bosses to hegemonise the struggle on immigration rights. In close-knit ethnic minority communities which are hard-hit by anti-immigrant attacks, it is often possible for petty-bourgeois “community leaders” – local bosses and religious leaders – to assume leadership of the fight to resist.

Where this happens, the progressive potential of these struggles is hobbled by the reactionary economic and political agenda of small employers. Socialists must fight to build a worker-led, socialist response to border regimes and deportations, which would naturally have its base in the unions. We must fight the anti-worker, communitarian politics of the petty bourgeoisie and build a socialist alternative as a pole of attraction to restaurant workers.

But it is also important to recognise that what the Bangladeshi Caterer’s Association is demanding – “Relax the immigration rules that restrict unskilled/semi-skilled workers from entering the country so that Bangladeshi chefs, cooks, kitchen porters etc. can enter the UK... Recognise knowledge of kitchen language (i.e. Bengali/Sylheti) as an essential skill to be considered by the Migration Advisory Committee” — is part of a Europe-wide process of bosses pressing their governments to convert migration law from a populist-racist electoral gambit into a more effective, subtler tool with which bosses can hyper-exploit their workers.

In France, the process is more developed. In the context of the raids, ID checks and constant surveillance of the Sarkozy government’s terroristic war on undocumented workers, bosses have won limited powers to protect and grant papers to their staff.

In this way, workers are tied closely to their bosses – each one personally anxious to win his employer’s favour and get regularised. Likewise, this state of affairs gives bosses access to a pool of permanently harassed, cheap labour — without the headaches of either labour unrest or immigration police interference.

This atomised, anxious, super-precarious, super-exploited misery is what the restaurant bosses of the Bangladeshi Caterers’ Association have in store for their workers. That is the vicious blow that Sunday’s demonstration was calculated to prepare. Undocumented workers must break from the dirty politics of the bosses and priests, and unite with their brothers and sisters in the wider union movement to defeat employers and border guards alike.

A No Borders activist says: “Only one union banner that I could see, and that was the Restaurant Workers’ Union, unknown to me. One of their reps explained to me that they were 1,500 strong and based in Brick Lane, mainly Indian restaurant workers. Formed over wage payment problems. He’d lost his job over such issues and had no contact with other unions. He now worked supplying labour to the trade.”

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.