I think I last owned a car in 1966 or 1967. It was both my first and last car and frankly something of a liability and it was a relief to get a few quid from the scrapyard when I drove it there. I had a driving licence for the next 48 years and did occasionally hire a car when necessary, though I stopped doing so after a minor accident when I drove off the road into a ploughed field. I wasn’t sure at the time if it had been caused by a mechanical failure or a momentary blackout. A few years later, after being diagnosed as diabetic, the second seemed most likely.
I’ve never been a car person. Except perhaps in my extreme youth where I carried my copy of I-Spy Cars onto our local streets, which were rather disappointingly short of Rolls Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, Maserati et al and rather stronger on Morris, Austin, Vauxhall and Ford, largely early post-war clapped out models. That Ford Popular was popular, as was the Morris Minor. My family never owned a car – my father rode an ancient bicycle and used a hand cart when he needed to shift anything heavy or bulky like building materials or furniture. His father had been killed in a traffic accident a few years before I was born, when his horse-drawn cart was hit by a car unable to stop as he turned right across its path into their entrance across the main road. But by the time I was born they could no longer afford a horse.
All of which has really nothing to do with the United Voices of the World (UVW) trade union protest against Kensington luxury car dealers H R Owen, except to point out that they live in a very different world to mine. A new Lamborghini apparently costs around £160,000 or more, which would take one of the showroom cleaners over 21,000 hours to earn, well over 10 years of full-time work. Small change of course for those with bankers bonuses.
Angelica Valencia and Freddy Lopez keep the Maserati and Ferrari showroom further down the road spotless, for which they are paid £7.50 an hour. It’s a miserly rate, well below the London Living Wage which is calculated as the minimum needed to live on in London – and when this protest took place was £9.75 (in 2018 it went up to £10.20.) The Living Wage is 30% more than employers Templewood (backed up by the luxury car dealers who contract them) pay their cleaners. Things were even worse than that. Not only were they on poverty pay, but they were being required to work longer hours than they were paid to do and Templewood was making unlawful deductions from those minimal wages.
Angelica and Freddy joined the union and asked to be paid a living wage, but the employers response was to suspend the two of them without pay. So the UVW decided to take the employers to the courts and protest outside the showrooms. The protest was supported by other UVW members and friends from other groups, including Class War and the Revolutionary Communist group who have long supported various campaigns to get a living wage for London’s low paid workers. Whether or not you agree with some of their political views, they are prepared to get out and protest effectively on behalf of those treated badly by society.
And this protest helped, though it took another a month or so later to finally get the employers to see how ridiculous they were being, recognise their obligations and reach a satisfactory settlement, which led to a third planned protest being called off.
Of course I was pleased for Angelica and Freddy, but I had rather enjoyed photographing the two protests and was just a little disappointed not to be able to cover a third. But there were plenty of other protests, too many other companies large and small that still pay staff the least they possibly can and treat them badly.
Cleaners at luxury car dealers HR Owen
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