Organise the unorganised

Submitted by AWL on 14 September, 2016 - 12:57

The Bakers, Food, and Allied Workers’ Union has been organising the “Hungry for Justice” campaign and unionising fast-food workers. Steve, the branch secretary of the Scarborough Wetherspoons BFAWU branch, spoke to Solidarity.


Hungry for Justice got us active around issues at work. They’re the only reason this sector is organised.Our branch got started on the back end of last year. We were having some issues with not getting our full entitlement to food discounts; we were only getting a couple of days’ notice on our rota instead of two weeks; and we were being called along to meetings but we weren’t being paid for our time there.

Those were the three main things.We started off in my workplace, and we put together a list of all the issues we were having. We got people to join the union based on people putting in a grievance on these issues.

We got about 10% of the pub in the union to begin with. We had a Facebook message thread for all members. We used it to put out minutes from meetings. One new member, it turned out, took that thread, printed it off, and gave it to the pub manager. The manager blew up and dragged us into work on our day off.

One member had already rung me up in tears, to say the boss was screaming about the union stuff. The behaviour of the manager was disgraceful. She brought up a worker’s previous suicide attempt to blackmail them to quit the union and accused us of bullying her! But she knew that her actions were out of order. The result of this whole confrontation was that the management conceded the demands that we had.

Around this time, we were doing street activity in the town centre around the demand for a £10/hour minimum wage. As part of a global day of action, in solidarity with the movement in the US, we did a demo in Scarborough. We have open meetings where anyone from any of the other workplaces can come along, including community activists, Labour Party activists and so on. As part of this broad campaign, we went into KFC and spoke to the staff there.

It turned out that KFC didn’t pay their staff after 10pm. KFC shut at 9pm — the boss expected them to be done closing up by 10pm, but if they weren’t done, they’d be kept behind to finish without pay. Staff were apprehensive about taking the issue up at first, but we did a demo outside.

I went in to speak to the management in the store, while the demo was on outside. The boss was very surprised, and said that this practice would end. After that, we started meeting KFC staff, one-on-one, and helping them take their issues in hand.

One worker emerged as an organiser, and then we had seven KFC workers along to our next open meeting. Now they’ve got a grievance together and they’re going to put it in. It’s about people not being paid properly, and a poor system of rectifying pay errors, so you can wait a month to get money back after a mistake; and people are in the same grade but on different pay rates. There has
been a bit of union busting, too.

The last meeting they had, the restaurant manager told the staff that if they were found to be in the union, their hours would be cut to zero. That’s why they have zero-hour contracts!

For me, the importance of the international day of action is to say that we’re the same as the guys out in the US. We’ve got shit money on a shit job. It’s like that across the world, we’re all the same, we’re all getting shafted. We want to show the American workers how much they are leading.If you’re interested in helping the Hungry for Justice campaign, the best place to start is with your own issues in your own workplace.

Join the BFAWU and contact your local rep or official. Make headway where you work, then go out and tackle the rest of the world!

• Follow the campaign on twitter: @FastfoodRights

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