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Unionising the service sector

A new wave of campaigning has seen the unions plant their first roots in the lives of super-exploited hospitality workers, writes MORGAN TOOTH

THE hospitality sector is the lowest paid and most precarious sector in Scotland — the median income is £7 an hour, £1.21 below the minimum wage.

This is largely due to the prevalence of age-bracketed minimum wages. Hospitality workers are predominantly young, often in their first jobs, with nothing to compare their low standard of employment to. It is also one of the most diverse sectors of the Scottish economy.

Over 20 per cent are migrant workers, with little knowledge of British employment rights. There are more female than male workers, and a higher proportion of people of colour, LGBT workers, and other communities at risk of marginalisation.

More than 25 per cent of hospitality workers are on a zero-hours contract, if they have a contract at all. That is three times the national average.

These contracts mean that workers don’t know one week to the next how many hours they’re going to get — with no guarantee of a stable income, they often struggle to get a lease, never mind save or get a mortgage.

Waiting tables is ranked as among the most stressful jobs to work in the world, above neurosurgery. This is due to lack of control, lack of financial reward and lack of respect.

Gone are the days when the bartender was considered the aristocracy of the working class, like in the 19th century US, and the romanticised character from so many films or songs who lends an ear to their patrons while putting the world to rights is only part of the picture.

These days we are expected to act as butlers, servants, bouncers, toilet cleaners, and therapists to those in the grips of loneliness, depression and too much alcohol.

Sexual harassment is endemic — 90 per cent of female hospitality workers have experienced sexual harassment at work, nearly double the national average.

This speaks to both poor public attitudes in general, but also to the environment created and expected by many bosses.

Workers at the Presidents Club men-only charity gala in London were asked to wear specific heels, over a certain height, specific skimpy dresses, and even matching underwear. Among the items on auction that day was lunch with none other than Boris Johnson.

Workers were encouraged to drink white wine before the event, then they were groped, suffered hands up their skirts, propositioned, invited to hotel rooms, flashed by customers and ask if they were prostitutes.

One hostess, a Unite member, told of a 10-hour shift she completed at a corporate away day for City workers in London. “I did not get a break or a chance to eat over those 10 hours. I earned £8.50 an hour, had my bottom pinched four times, and was asked about my sex life more times than I care to remember over expensive pastries and coffee that cost more per head than my hourly rate.”

Recently, I represented a 62-year-old woman working at a hotel restaurant in Edinburgh. She has worked there for 10 years, transferring from the Sheraton Grand after 17 years.

It was clear she knew her job and was capable. She was called into a meeting to discuss concerns about her health, and possible termination of her contract, six months after her return to work from a bout of pneumonia, likely caused by cleaning chemicals and lack of safety training with hazardous materials.

She had overheard the besuited thirty-something management talking about how they wanted to hire more young women to attract a different kind of clientele.

She had also been on a 39-hour contract for 10 years at the minimum wage. She regularly works 50 hour weeks. She did not know that she was entitled to be paid for those hours.

There has been so little union presence in the hospitality industry for years that the first steps Unite has taken into the industry have been met with murmurs of excitement.

Small change in an industry crying out for it can be more significant than big wins in established industries. Ten per cent of the British working population works within the hospitality sector, and until I joined Unite just over two years ago, I had never met a single unionised worker. But we are changing that.

In the last two years we have won campaigns across the industry, forcing the G1 Group to scrap zero-hours contracts, getting rid of the sexist uniform policy at the Grand Central Hotel, and winning paid transport home for club workers across Glasgow.

A year-long campaign of strikes at TGI Fridays brought into focus the issue of fair tips and has won promised legislation which commits to forcing employers to hand over 100 per cent of tips to the workers who earned them.

In Edinburgh, we have worked with the Fair Fringe campaign which has won better conditions for thousands of workers at the world’s biggest arts festival, with a commitment from Edinburgh Council to ensure the living wage and minimum-hour contracts at every council-owned venue in the city.

After a sustained campaign at my workplace, Summerhall — once a notoriously bad employer — last year we achieved one of the first recognition agreements in a British hospitality workplace. We are now in negotiations to scrap zero-hours contracts and bring in the real living wage, because the people who work there understand their worth and are willing to fight for it.

That was followed this year by recognition at the Stand chain of comedy clubs across Scotland, and the Newtown Theatre, one of the biggest employers at the Edinburgh festival, becoming the first employers to meet all points on our Fair Hospitality Charter.

The industry is beginning to change due to the pressure from below. Not only that, but our sector has produced perhaps the most internationally exciting politicians in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Her radicalism and charisma is a product of her background and her lived experience. The grinding pressures and enforced social aspects of hospitality can and will produce more of these political diamonds. The untapped potential is huge. We need to make sure we have the resources to find and support them.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking the decline of the established, heavily unionised industries and the rise of the precarious, so-called “gig economy” is a coincidence.

It is the Establishment’s plan to put the working classes back in their place, and reap a windfall of profit from under-politicised and under-unionised generations, who are forced to work several part time jobs to make ends meet, nomadically moving from insecure contract to insecure contract, workplace solidarity atomised.

There are no canteens for us to talk shop in. The changeover at 6pm on a Friday night is hardly the time and place for a lecture from a Frank Owen character about “the money trick.” We must outflank the bosses, regain control of our workplaces, and stop the expansion of the precariat, and to do so, we must innovate in new ways of union organising.

Morgan Tooth is a Unite activist and hospitality worker.

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