Tag: stealing tips

Waiters Day, Monsanto, White Pride & The Line – 2015

Waiters Day, Monsanto, White Pride & The Line: Saturday 23rd May 2015 was a busy day, beginning with Unite Hotel Worker, moving on to the global March Against Monsanto, then an extreme right White Pride protest and finally going to the opening of the world-class sculpture walk roughly along the Greenwich Meridian, The Line.

Waiters Day call for fair contracts and union rights

Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane

Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union President Ian Hodson

The Hotel Workers branch of Unite protested outside the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane, the birthplace of Zero Hours Contracts, on National Waiters Day, calling for an end to poor conditions, poverty wages, zero hours contracts and management stealing of tips.

Some of the protesters wore masks and placards with names of leading company bosses using zero hours contracts and exploiting workers and took part in a short ‘waiters race’ along the pavement in front of the hotel. The race was of course fixed

Back in 1979 waiters at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane were sacked when they tried to organise a trade union branch there. The case eventually went to court where it was decided their sacking was legal. It was this case, O’Kelly v Trusthouse Forte plc, that opened to door to Zero Hours Contracts in the UK. Previously employment law had been based on “mutuality of obligation” with employers obliged to offer hours of work, and employees to work those hours.

Until 2012 less than 1% of employees were on zero hours contracts, but their use then rocketed, and by 2015 had increased to 2.5%. By 2021, roughly half of the organisations in hospitality and entertainment were using them.

National Waiters Day seems to have been invented in the USA in the early years of this century and is generally observed on May 21st. A UK Waiters Day was begun by restaurant manager Fred Sirieix in 2013 and is on October 20th.

Waiters Day – fair contracts and union rights

March Against Monsanto

Downing St

In London the annual Global March Against Monsanto by over 3.5 million people across 600 cities was marked by a small static protest opposite Downing St.

Monsanto and other companies which profit from GMOs claim they are playing an important part in feeding the world, but are actually attempting to monopolise food production for their own profit, patenting existing species, trying to prevent farmers from saving and using their own seed, encouraging the use of highly toxic chemicals and practices that degrade the soil.

As the protesters say, we need to plant our own seed, to grow local and to eat sustainable food, and to do so in our own ways in countries across the world.

March Against Monsanto

White pride protest for David Lane

US Embassy

The end of the banner reading Töten für Wotan (Kill for Wotan) was rolled up as I moved to photograph it

A group of around 30 ultra-right neo-Nazi protesters at the US Embassy remembered David Eden Lane, a convicted criminal and author of the ‘14 words’ statement used by extreme right groups about securing a future for white children. A small group of anti-fascists had come to oppose them.

One of the right-wing protesters makes a Nazi salute for my camera

Lane was a co-foounder of ‘The Order‘ a rabidly antisemitic group which bombed theatres and synagogues and he was convicted as the getaway driver after they murdered liberal Jewish Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg in 1984 when he was the second on their long death list. The group also carried out violent robberies to finance their activities. He died in prison in 2007.

His 14 words, a close quotation from Mein Kampf, is often referred to in extreme right circles as ’14/88′, where 88 stands for the repeated 8th letter of the alphabet, HH, shorthand for ‘Heil Hitler’.

Peter Rushton of the England First Party waits to speak

Inside jail, Lane, a former Ku Klux Klan and the ‘White Christian Separatist’ group ‘Aryan Nation’ member, was one of the founders of a new pagan religion, ‘Wotanism‘, named after the Germanic god Odin, also know as Wotan, which serves as an acronym for ‘Will Of The Aryan Nation’.

White pride protest for David Lane

Cody Dock Opening for ‘The Line’

Bow Creek, West Ham

It was good to get away to something much more pleasant, the official opening of the world-class sculpture walk, ‘The Line‘ with works by distinguished sculptors going north from Greenwich across the Thames and on to the Olympic Park.

I’d visited the festivities at Cody Dock in the morning when few people were around to photograph the site and walk a short stretch of the trail.

One piece I found particularly interesting was DNA SL90 (2003) made by Abigail Fallis from 22 shopping trolleys for a supermarket chain to mark the 50th anniversary of Crick & Watson’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. It’s location on the edge of Bow Creek next to a major distribution centre, seemed particularly appropriate, and it is an impressive piece.

A Cody Dock volunteer snips the ribbon and ‘The Line’ is open

I returned from central London just in time for the opening ceremony when a fair sized crowd had gathered.

Since 2015 new stairs down from the bridge at have removed the awkward detour alongside the busy Blackwall Tunnel Approach, but I think we are still waiting for the opening of the riverside path along Bow Creek south of Cody Dock.

Cody Dock Opening for ‘The Line’

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Protest tells Harrods ‘Stop Stealing Tips’

Protest tells Harrods ‘Stop Stealing Tips’
On Saturday 7th December 2017, the United Voices of the World trade union held a protest outside Harrods in Kensington demanding that the restauarant workers there receive the service changes that customers pay on meals.

The UVW is a grass roots union that represents workers in low paid sectors, and their members include chefs and waiters at Harrods. As well as demanding that the workers get the tips they are also demanding that conditions and wages to be improved for waiters who are currently paid at or a few pence per hour above the legal minimum, overworked and poorly managed.

A few people seemed not to support the protest

Harrods, the richest and most prestigious department store in the world, is owned by the immensely wealthy Qatari royal family – and they were then adding to that wealth by taking up to 75% of the tips that customers believed and intended to be going to the staff who served them.

THe UVW succeeded in getting a great deal of public support and even some from our right-wing mass media (it almost certainly helped there that Harrods is owned by foreigners) and several hundred people came to protest outside the store, notably including supporters of Class War.

Harrods was supported by a large contingent of police, who at times went beyond there duty to keep the peace and seemed to be taking the side of the Qatari royal family who of course have many friends in high places including the Foreign Office who will have put pressure on the Met to take effective action against the protesters.

Police film the protest from inside Harrods – but Class War held a banner in front of the doors

I described the protest as “robust but peaceful” and although at times the protesters blocked the entrances and crowded around the doors, at times holding them open they made no real attempt to enter the store, as police warned that they would immediately be arrested for aggravated trespass. A couple were arrested for trivial matters on the street during the protest, but generally the protest went well and people were in a good mood as it ended and I caught the tube to go home.

Later I heard that as UVW members were packing away their flags, banners, drums and vuvuzelas, police had come and made 4 more arrests, including that of UVW General Secretary Petros Elia. It also appeared that some had been dragged inside the store and locked up by Harrods security staff before being handed over to police.

All were later released without charge, but on police bail – with the condition that they were not to go within 50m of Harrods. It appears to have been a deliberate abuse of the law to try to stop further protests at Harrods – however legitimate these may be. One man who had been grabbed after letting off a smoke flare on the street during the protest – now a rather common occurrence at protests – had apparently accepted a police caution.

Following the protest, and with threats of more protests to come, Harrods finally gave in and agreed to give 100% of the service charge to staff, with an independent tronc master to administer the distribution with staff on the committee.

The UVW continues to fight for its workers at Harrods, and in December 2021 planned a further protest in advance of a strike in the Christmas shopping period. The strike and protest were both called off after Harrods agreed to large pay rises, taking all the waiters and chefs above the London Living Wage – for some it meant a pay rise of almost £5,000 a year, and Harrods has also guaranteed annual increases of 3% from 2023.

Small but active trade unions such as the UVW, along with a few of the major unions are showing that collective action works, while some larger unions seem more rather less interested in their lower paid members. In March 2021, Labour’s North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll published an article in the Journal and Evening Chronicle and on his blog with the title ‘What Have Trade Unions Ever Done For Us?’ which included the following two paragraphs

For a start, unions stopped child labour. Unionised workplaces are safer, with 50% fewer accidents. Every year unions train 10,000 safety reps. Union members earn, on average, 12.5 per cent more than non-members. They have better job security, and stay in their jobs for an average of five years longer than non-members. Unionised workplaces have higher productivity and fewer industrial tribunals.

Apart from that, though, trade unions have only gained us paid holidays, maternity and paternity leave, paid sick leave, equal pay legislation, pensions, and workplace anti-discrimination laws. Oh, and the weekend. It was unions that fought for a five day working week.

Jamie Driscoll’s blog

If you work, join a union. “You have a legal right to join a union. It’s illegal for an employer to disadvantage you because you are a union member.”