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The sacking was met with a solidarity strike by Heathrow baggage handlers, check-in and bus drivers, mainly, like the catering workers, members of Transport and General Workers Union.
The one-day solidarity strike, illegal under the Thatcherite anti-union laws maintained by New Labour, severely disrupted BA’s operations, losing them million of pounds and disrupting Heathrow, one of the two or three most important airport hubs internationally.
The dispute has not been resolved and the workers remained sacked.
There are two remarkable features about the solidarity strike. It was 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 is partly because they were a unionised workforce, which is unusual amongst low-paid workers in Britain these days.
They are also a workforce that is overwhelmingly made up of Punjabi women, and Asian women seem to have a remarkable capacity for resisting employers and defending their rights.
The tenacious Hillingdon Hospital strikers spring to mind. They were members of the public sector union UNISON sacked in 1995 and won full reinstatement and compensation after three years of struggle.
- Asian women also led the fight at Hillingdon hospital in the mid-1990s
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 unsurprisingly was an 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 Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) had been in negotiations with Gate Gourmet about redundancy and working conditions for over a year. Numerous proposed deals had been rejected by the workforce.
A deal was eventually imposed by Gate Gourmet 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 TGWU 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 the government’s arbitration service 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 Gate Gourmet 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 unions once again had no answer.
Although Tony Woodley launched a big attack on the laws, saying that they were strangling the trade union movement by preventing it from defending its members, he went through the usual ritualistic repudiation of the strike in line with the requirement of the laws.
The fact is that after 20 years of these laws being in place the unions have no reply to them other than “defend the fabric of the union.” (In other words, to defend the finances of the union which can be confiscated in toto if the union leadership refuses to obey the law.) The problem with this is that is these laws are not tackled there may be no “fabric” to defend.
The problem for Tony Woodley is that the is issue of the most repressive trade union laws in any developed country other than under dictatorships is a political issue not just an industrial one.
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.
