AngryWorkers - A Conversation

5/18/24, 3:59 PM AngryWorkers: A conversation | libcom.
org
AngryWorkers: A
conversation
A IWW comrade and researcher asked us questions about our

local experiences and thoughts on working class organising...
Submitted by
AngryWorkersWorld on
September 6, 2019
Q: Do you want to give me a brief description of the group?

What are your aims and how do you go about achieving them?
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5/18/24, 3:59 PM AngryWorkers: A conversation | libcom.org
T: We are a collective based in West London, we moved here 5

years ago. We wanted to move to an area that was politically
interesting for us, and this area was that because it has lots of
workers, there are 80,000 workers around Heathrow airport,
then Greenford - where we live - is a smaller area but it’s got
lots of warehouses and Park Royal, which is where I currently
work, it’s got about 30-40,000 workers. And it’s also a very
migrant area. We are a bit on the outskirts of the ‘left’, so we
thought we need to pick an area and basically get rooted there
and take some responsibility for doing work there. And we
also wanted to have some basis for our political work, because
we felt that a lot of left- wing groups were doing a lot of
campaigning but weren’t necessarily rooted in the class or had
any connection to working class people’s lives. So we get jobs
in the bigger local workplaces, and try to see if we can
organise there.
We don’t have any set strategy for how we do that. We spend
the first few months basically finding out what’s going on,
talking to people, and seeing how things are operating. And
then normally we put out leaflets and flyers about an issue that
people are concerned about. And slowly build up a core groups
of workers who want to do something. So we have an aim to
set up workplace groups. And we also have a Solidarity
Network group, where we meet every Monday in 3 local
places around here, in a McDonald’s, in an Indian tea shop,
and in the Asda café. We put up posters around, saying if
anyone’s got a problem with their landlord or their workplace
they can drop in. The problem with the solidarity network is
that people come, they get something, and then they leave
again. Which has always been a problem with solidarity
networks. We are aware of that. At the same time because so
many people live and work locally, you do try to keep in touch
with them and they try and keep in touch with us. And its also
a way of linking to other workplaces where we don’t work as
people move around from job to job.
And then the third thing is the newspaper, Workers Wild West.
The experiences of the Solidarity Network and the workplaces
are talked about and discussed in the paper. What can workers
learn from other people’s experiences, our own experiences,
but also its got political articles in there, about what’s going
on, Brexit and nationalism or immigration. And then the
fourth thing, is having a bit of an international outlook and
making links with international groups or groups doing

similar things to us. So we go to meetings, we just got back
from Greece and we just had two meetings there with
comrades. It’s easy to get stuck to your daily routine and it’s so
overwhelming- you become quite local, but actually if the aim
is not to share those local experiences to the wider left and the
wider class, then it’s not so useful.
S: Obviously organising always happens in a social context,
and we have to say something about the wider context
otherwise we can’t really address it. You can organise and
organise and organise, but there are a lot of things outside of
the immediate workplace that impact on the capacity of the
class to act, mainly like Brexit, migration issues, the wider
political atmosphere. So we try to have a discussion within the
left. For example, it’s normally quite split between people who
organise and they just do this daily day and continuous work
where they are always focused on ‘more’ and ‘more’
organising, without really thinking about how their actions
relate to economic crisis, or the general situation of the
system. Then you got people who are writing a lot about
political issues but don’t really relate it to the problems of day-
to-day practice of the class. So we try to encourage doing
both, which is difficult sometimes.
Q: So you have this attempt to unite theory and action. And
also to use the experiences of action to inform theory and vice
versa. Can you describe briefly what the situation is in these
workplaces that you have gone into?
S: Yeah, let’s take Sainsbury’s as one example.
T: Generally, they are all low-waged sector jobs.
S: Yeah. They are what is called ‘unskilled’ or ‘low-skilled’
work. Actually 90% migrant workforce, half Eastern European,
half Asian. People from Somalia as well, but mainly Eastern
Europeans and mainly Asian. In Sainsbury’s distribution centre
they distribute to all the small convenience stores in North
London. That is done by Wincanton, a transport logistics
company that has about 14-15 thousand workers in the UK.
In the Greenford distribution centre there are around 500
workers in total. The permanent workers are always employed
through Wincanton, but half the workers are through an
agency.] They are on 0 hour contracts and only receive about
5/18/24, 3:59 PM ] AngryWorkers: A conversation | libcom.org
70% of the wage of the permanents. Half of the permanents

are Eastern European and the other half are Nepali or Indian.
And the agency workers are mainly Eastern European. They
have a pick rate in the warehouse that is connected to your
entitlement to shifts or your likelihood to get shifts the next
day so…
T: Very competitive atmosphere…
S: Yes. So you have to pick 220 items, roughly, through the
scanner. The scanner is a wrist-watch unit which tells you
where and how many items you pick - you wear a little
scanner tied to your finger. It makes you look like a budget
Robocop. It’s just a normal surveillance. You can see your pick
rate on the screen, you see the pick rate in a league table on
the noticeboard in the briefing room and you get a text
message on your mobile phone. If you are on the bottom third
of the pick, then it’s likely that your shift gets cancelled. So
they always try to have more workers than they need in order
to build up that bit of pressure.
T: There is quite a high turnover as well, of agency people.
Because it’s also very cold, and the pay is minimum wage, so
it’s not much. If people do stay it’s because the incentive is to
get a permanent contract. And then you get more money.
S: Yeah, good money. That’s also the problem, because
permanents know that, since they are a bit older, they can’t get
a warehouse job for that money easily. They would have to go
to Amazon and Amazon doesn’t hire and is far away. They get
over 10 pound an hour. That means that the difference
between permanents and agency is kind of extreme.
T: Quite a lot of workplaces, the differential between temps
and permanents is not that big. It’s like, normally the same,
maybe there is a few pence difference. But then that similarity
is maybe good to bring those workers together.
S: There is a higher turnover of the male workers, because
they find something quicker. Female workers tend to stay
longer, their English is often not as good. And yeah, we had
some meetings, discussions, and we demanded that we have at
least 3 guaranteed shifts per week. The point was to reduce
the pressure from doing all of this hardcore picking. Later we
discussed how to struggle to get the same wage as the
permanents. So some people put forward the demand, and the

company brought someone from the headquarters of the
agency in Birmingham. So they brought managers from
Birmingham, they brought all 80 people who worked on that
shift in the chiller, individually, to talk to the big boss from
Birmingham. So that had 2 effects. One was a positive one,
workers saw that they take us seriously, when beforehand they
thought that management would just laugh at us. The fact that
they got the big bosses from Birmingham shows that we
scared them. But on the other hand, it was also intimidating
because everyone was in the meetings individually.
There is a union in the warehouse, it’s Unite…
T: And that’s another point, because a lot of the workplaces
are low wage sector, I think people assume there are no
unions, because it’s unskilled work it’s ‘ununionized’. Actually,
in most places, there is a union, but it’s just that they don’t
represent the temp workers at all. And it’s arguable if they’re
even good for the permanents.
Q: So do you want to talk to me about that a bit more? So
what are the unions doing, how do they communicate with
their workers, do they care about the temps?
S: Let’s finish the Sainsbury’s story, and then we can talk about
the unions in general. Unite in the Sainsbury’s warehouse, had
a 2.5% pay increase deal every 2 years for the permanents. We
could see that on the noticeboard 40 percent of the
permanents voted against, 60% in favour, they know that the
wages are already above average so they didn’t do anything.
Most of the Unite reps were quality controllers, supervisors.
Reps, in general, because they stay longer in the company, also
become supervisors or managers. So that’s not uncommon.
70% of reps tend to be also supervisor staff, you know. So we
joined Unite as only 2 or 3 agency workers, but they never
approached us. Normally you could think, if you were a rep
and agency workers join you, you think that ‘oh maybe, we can
organise the temps’, but they had no interest whatsoever.
Then we put forward a demand, we tried to have a separate
leaflet for the permanent workers and the truck drivers and
say ‘this is happening’. We tried to say that ‘you have an
interest that the agency workers don’t work for so low wages’,
because it’s less likely that they are going to replace
permanents with agency staff to save some money. The

response was medium. The truck drivers were verbally
supportive but nothing more. And then we did a slow down
for one day. And the repercussions were that they call all 80
people individually into a room, until people gave names, so 2
of us got sacked. And we tried to get a disciplinary process,
investigations, we tried to get representation from Unite, since
we were Unite members, and they refused. The union said that
we would get in trouble because it was an ‘unofficial industrial
action’. Obviously they didn’t say that in writing, but like, we
called the Heathrow office, we called all of the local reps in the
warehouse, and they were not picking up the phone.
Q: So you went to the disciplinaries on your own?
S: Yeah.
Q: Unaccompanied?
S: Yeah. It is your legal right to be accompanied by a rep, but
the Unite reps did not want to represent us. So, it was clear,
from the beginning that they had the chance to sack us,
because we were on a zero hour contract and the whole
investigation was quite farcical. They did it in the end, a few
people snitched, told them names.
T: Actually they went through that firing process by the book.
I think that at that stage. They thought that maybe there was
another big union behind what we were doing. Because it was
inconceivable that we were just doing it ourselves, they
thought that there was some big power behind it. So they went
through the proper process to sack 2 of us. But then when
they sacked me a few weeks later, they realised that there
wasn’t a union there, so they didn’t go through any process. I
literally just finished my shift and they called me to a meeting
unannounced, fired me on the spot, and led me out. There was
no process followed.
Q: Surprising for Sainsburys. You expect it from smaller
businesses. Did you not try to, because you are also members
of the IWW…
T: We weren’t then.
S: And there was a calculated risk. Most people leave the job
after 3 or 4 months, we stayed there for 9 months already.
And we just thought that we take the risk, we try not to get
colleagues that really want to keep the job too involved, just
like, ‘listen, keep your head down and work slow’, it was us
who went around and told people…
Q: How was the response to this? How easy was it to organise?
T: The only reason it worked really is because mainly it was
Polish agency workers. And because we were working with a
Polish comrade at the time, she was able to talk to them a lot
in Polish. We only had a half-hour break, but she stayed for an
hour in the canteen in the few days in the run-up, she just
talked to everybody and didn’t care that she was overstaying
her break. And she made a point of trying to talk to everyone.
It was quite difficult because they weren’t with it. I remember
her saying she was talking to people and they said ‘yeah yeah,
that’s a good idea’ but then they would also just accept things.
So she would be quite critical of them to their face. She’d tell
them that ‘oh you’re just all talk’ and, you know, she was not
‘nicey nice’ with them. And I think that kind of relationship,
we wouldn’t be able to have. We were in quite a lucky position
there. But the thing that ticked the balance was the argument
that actually, if they worked slower, they would work longer
hours, so they’d end up making more money. This argument is
what worked for them.
S: But normally the trucks had to go out at the end of the
shift, and if it’s even two hours delay, WIncanton would have
to pay a big fine to Sainsbury’s. But then they got the
permanent workers to work overtime, and they were happy to
do that. So that was a problem. Although they knew that these
agency guys are doing a slow-down, they still took the
overtime. So that was a bit of a problem.
Q: Do you think that there is any possibility that Unite was
happy to see the back of you? That they refused to represent
you also because they thought that you were stepping on their
turf a little bit?
T: To be honest, I think the main reason was that the reps
were just very overworked and were apathetic. I remember
when I was being led out of the warehouse, I saw the rep, and
I was like ‘they’re sacking me!’. I was being escorted out, and
she just didn’t know what to do. She had no idea.
S: Yeah, but they were scared that they would be seen as part,
or supporting, unofficial industrial action.
T: Yeah, because they weren’t strong, and they were clueless. I
don’t think it was kind of like, a malicious ‘oh we need to keep
these people out’. They were just crap.
S: The same, on the other side of the road. There is Waitrose
spirits warehouse, and the same agency, different conditions -
way worse- and also a different union, USDAW. So it’s like,
same logistics company across the road, different union, and
no communication between the two. And they have also big
wage gap between temp workers and the permanents. The
temp agency announced a cut of the overtime bonus. It was a
quite unusually high overtime bonus, 1.5, something you
normally don’t get any more. They said ‘were going to cut
that’, and because one of us was working there, we could react
the next morning with a leaflet calling for a boycott of
overtime. And then we had a park meeting, 15 people, 10 or
15 people, most of them drunk, and we said ‘no overtime from
now on’, so the temp guys did no overtime. And then the
USDAW union rep, who is also a bit of a supervisor and
trainer, said ‘yeah yeah that’s good, so we pick up the overtime
because they have to pay us so much’. So he kind of half-said
we cost the company proper money, but what they were
actually doing was scabbing because they were picking up the
overtime. So they were doing double-shifts, 16 hours, and the
union rep was supporting that. But they postponed the cut of
the bonus for about two months or something, and then they
cut it later. And then they didn’t have enough people for
Christmas, so they had to introduce a bonus, an extra payment
like, ‘if you do your full 5 days a week you get 60 pound extra’
or something. It was quite a substantial one because like, they
felt that, you know, the guys might not work enough before
Christmas where everyone wants their spirits.
T: It was the union rep’s largely being middle-managers or
supervisors. In my place it’s also that they are related to each
other and, yeah, so they…. I don’t know, there is all these kind
of rumors about, are they getting paid from the branch- which
they are not supposed to get paid if you are just a regular rep-
and then they would just get the people that they want or who
are related to them, keeping that power amongst themselves.
Q: And these are migrant workers?

T: Yeah.
Q: So, there is an unofficial connection between the union in
that specific branch, the workers in the specific branch, and the
communities that make up the workforce.
T: Yeah.
Q: Many times, in the literature for example, you see this idea
of community unionism. That we need to put the
communities, make sure that people are involved, that they
control what they are doing and stuff like that. But from what
you are saying that can also be a little bit counter-productive.
T: Yeah, yeah
Q: So, what sort of problems exist?
S: The main problem in the community is that, many of them,
like, at the Sainsbury’s warehouse, the Polish had one manager,
the Polish manager, and the Asians had one manager, the Asian
manager and they were all talking in their own language. But
the reference point was always, ‘we’ve got our own manager
here’ or ‘we can get our group something’. It is similar with
the union reps as well, they tend to believe ‘we are the
spokespeople of that Gujarati’ or…
T: Caste and nepotism can play a role as well, they already
have some kind of status or standing, within that community,
which maybe means they are more closely related to the
temple, or… like one of the guys, he was doing trade-unionism
back in Gujarat or whatever, so he’s got experience, so he
brings his family members into the rep positions, but then
these kind of intra-community hierarchies just keep getting
reproduced and not challenged, because from the outside it
looks like, ‘oh well they have the same colour, the same
interests’. But they don’t.
S: Yeah, the same with the Solidarity Network. In Southhall
now, it is this big Punjabi area. Most of the older generation
who came in the 60s-70s are often now shop-owners,
landlords, managers, bosses. There is a kind of strata that is
well established. They often exploit people who just arrived
more recently, who have no English. So we have a lot of
solidarity network cases where new migrants are paid below

the minimum wage, which is not common in England, actually
illegal employment is not very frequent, but there it is. And
that is obviously covered up by the community. When you
attack these bosses, they counterattack by saying ‘this guy
betrayed us, he got these outsiders in, he betrayed the
community...’
T: And there was an example from a few years ago, with this
temple in Wembley. There is a Hindu temple there which is
very ornately made, it’s all carved stonework, and they got
specialist workers from India to come and do that, and they
were employed by the temple for 37p a day or something! One
of them eventually approached an external union…they found
one construction union who helped them. So I was asking
whether the ‘community’ who go to the temple, the local
people, were supportive of the workers, because the temple
management who were employing them obviously had power
and contacts in the community. The union guy said that the
workers did get community support but it was also a faction
who wanted to take control of the temple, so…. people may
support you but they also have their personal and group
agendas, you just have to keep a distance from it.
S: On the higher level, you’ve got Ealing council obviously,
also a lot of people who come from the 70s movement of
Asians, active in anti-racism, and the Labour party became a
bit like their career path. I mean that if you establish yourself
as a community leader, then you can become a councillor, and
right now, they also have a kind of network with all the
possibilities attached of corruption. You might find this
anywhere but having power in the community helps it, I guess.
You can be backed and also defend and say ‘yes, but I am a
community leader, if you attack me you attack the community’.
So now, it’s negative, largely. And the left is very bad because
they are outside this reality, and then with all the anti-racism
proclamations they are easily, ‘oh the community this, the
community that, the Muslim community’ and all that. That’s
completely bollocks, I mean, largely.
Q: One thing I have noticed a lot in your publications is that
youtry to promote self-empowerment of people, so like, ‘don’t
let the union do it for you, don’t let your leaders, whoever
they are do it for you, come and organise’ and stuff like that.
What sort of concrete organising methods do you use other

than just saying that? And second of all, have you seen any
success?
T: So in my factory when I first started, we were putting in
leaflets calling for workers to contact us and have a meeting
outside work. Because we knew the people didn’t like the
union in there, we were like ‘you have to do your own thing,
contact us’. Some individuals did contact us, and we met them
individually, but it was never that a group of workers would
come together and say, ‘alright we want to do something’.
There was not much to work with. So that’s the point where
we decided to I go into the union and become a rep and try to
use this space where people might feel less scared to come
together. I mean not that there was much going on within the
existing union structure, but because the reps were so inactive,
I took the opportunity to do my own thing - so I organised
meetings for specific groups of workers, tried to get them to
discuss how they could use health and safety rules to put
pressure on the managers, things like that.
In the last week though, there has been a group of about 40-
60 workers in one department at one site who put in their
own (i.e. without help from the union) pay petition and
following that, staged a ‘strike’ on bank holiday Monday. We
distributed one of our bulletins the week before this happened.
Obviously we can’t say that it’s all down to the bulletin, but I
think various things have come together: our bulletin is
encouraging people to take action themselves; workers see a
regular presence of ‘Angry Workers’ outside the factory; the
union has an active and militant £1/hr increase pay campaign
running; the union has shown itself to be more interested in
workers’ involvement over the last year…So I think it’s not a
total coincidence that things have gotten ‘hot’ now, the first
time workers have ever done something like this in a more
self-organised way.
And on a more day-to-day level, if someone comes to me as a
union rep with a grievance or something and it’s an issue
affecting lots of people, then I will write the letter for them,
tell them they should go collect more signatures and then at
least they have some ownership of it, and then make sure that
at least one or two of them come with me if there is a meeting
with management, just to make them feel like, ‘it’s your thing,
I’m just helping you to do it’. But I am the only rep that does
that, so it will take time to build up that culture.
Q: And is there any other movements, organisations or groups
that you work with to promote this sort of empowerment?
T: We are members of IWW and we are reps of them as well.
We did an organising drive with them last year, so for 6
months we targeted 10 different workplaces in the area,
workplaces that were not already in the union. One of the
places was a sandwich factory and they were the most keen, so
we had like 3 or 4 meetings with them, and like, 30-40
workers would come to that. Our emphasis was for them to
decide what they want to do and the union will support that,
we are not going to tell you what to do. It didn’t really lead
anywhere in the end though, and now I found out that actually
the GMB is recruiting there, and they got like 40-50 members
now. This isn’t too surprising though. It’s understandable that
these workers would prefer a strong organisation to come in
and take more of a leading role. Also because the workers
didn’t really trust each other that much, and what we were
asking them to do might have seemed like a lot to lay at their
door all at once! Because we were asking a lot of them - to
start pushing back on the shop-floor; talk to other co-workers;
think about whether they wanted to go for recognition and the
pros and cons… They had already done a joint petition, lots of
people had signed it….
S: They did a walk out, because they weren’t allowed to take
an extra break when they were doing overtime, after they had
already worked 10 or 11 hours…
T: They all just clocked out at 9pm. So they had done some
stuff together but the point was that they didn’t trust each
other. They were like ‘oh the Goans won’t do this’ or ‘the
Indians won’t do that’, that was very difficult. So, and then we
came along saying ‘OK, we could go on strike but we’d need to
go through these particular steps, or we could try and do more
work-to-rule stuff, which means doing this, or we could fight
this particular issue, meaning we would need these documents
etc.’ We laid it all out. I don’t know if it was information
overload or what. But, yeah, they kind of backed off. And I
think it’s quite telling that they have gone to the GMB. And
the GMB strategy is to focus more on developing individual

people inside the factory on a one-on-one basis.
S: The main problem is that individually, people are in a weak
position. You have migration issues for a lot of Asian workers,
they have to have £18,600 pound a year that they have to earn
in order to bring their spouse over, so they have to depend on
overtime, they can’t afford to lose the job. But collectively they
have quite a strong position. You look at food processing,
warehousing, something like 60% of the food consumed in
London goes through this stretch of London. But how do you
discover that you have a collective power if you are not using
it? Theoretically, maybe the workers know that quite a lot
depends on their work, but they don’t really see it. I think the
challenge is to get that initial kind of confidence, and do an
action and see the result, and then there might be a chain
reaction. Because workers here, they have worked in a lot of
companies, so people have contacts, they know a lot of people.
Where I work, a big warehouse, 1400 people, most of them
have worked at Heathrow, a lot of their partners work in the
food factory where T works, so it’s like, it’s all there, it’s just
waiting to happen.
And if you look at the situation for example in Italy, where it
happened, warehouse sector, logistics sector, rank and file
union, no paid organisers really, they started with a few
hundred, did a lot of individual support work and then got 1
or 2 successful strikes and all of a sudden 30-40 thousand
people joined and did one strike after the other. But the way
that it happened was that initially you only had a minority of
workers inside the warehouse being willing to go on strike, but
you had 200-300 supporters outside to blockade the
warehouse. That is only possible because of having a strong
left. And they also had already a few migrant workers who
were on board. So the support, the solidarity network, if it
worked properly and gained more capacity, would get you like
an initial 50-60 people that you would need in order to
support a minority strike, in order to get the ball rolling. But
in Italy obviously, the migrants are mainly from Northern
Africa, they were inspired by Arab Spring, and there are
specific conditions in Italy with the labour law and things. We
cant just copy it, but yeah, that would be the idea basically of
how we can imagine something like that happening. The thing
is, you can’t rely on the blockade, because you get more and
more confrontations with the police, you have to get the ball
rolling and then inspire workers to say ‘OK, there are so many
things that you can do at work to keep on the pressure, now
that you have a collective kind of confidence’. And yeah, people
do it. ‘Work to rule’, is something that workers use semi-
collectively and semi-consciously.
Q: You are advising the possibility of ‘work to rule’ a lot in
your publications.
S: Yeah, food hygiene…
T: Because I work in a food factory, there are lots of
possibilities of using health and safety to say ‘no, we’re not
doing this because it is unsafe’. It can be an effective way of
pushing back against increasing workloads, especially when
management are always getting you to cut corners to get the
food out on time. I have been a driver for 2 and a half years
and it has taken 2 years to actually get the 5 or 6 of us to start
acting together. And I think one of the big problems is that
people don’t like telling other co-workers what to do. And,
especially if you are all guys, they get really defensive, like
‘you’re not my manager, don’t tell me what to do!’ So it’s very
difficult to build up a kind of solidarity and just a set of
minimum standards that you will all agree to work to. As the
only woman there, maybe it has been a bit easier to just tell
people, ‘ok, this is what we’re doing now’. And they don’t feel
as threatened because it isn’t another man just telling them
what to do. I think that has somehow worked, but it still takes
a long time to do it. 3 of you can decide something and the 1
agency worker that they bring in, that you haven’t spoken to,
he scabs or something. People get demoralised because if it
doesn’t work straight away, they just think it’s not going to
work and they give up. But you just have to keep going, try
again and again. It’s taken time but now we are at a point
where we use the health and safety rules to say ‘we are not
going to do this’. And really the management are at a loss,
because they don’t know what to do about it, they aren’t used
to it, so they’ve backed off.
Q: So, from your experience, what do you think are the
objectives of the big unions in these workplaces? Do they want
to actually empower people, or do they just want to go
through the motions to feel good about themselves? Why is it
necessary for a collective like yourselves to fill the gap when

these massive organisations already exist?
T: The main union model is about… well, by organising, they
mean recruitment. So there's very little actual ‘organising’
training, when they train you as a rep. I mean, there’s nothing
about how do you build collectivity at work. It’s all about how
you sell the union to get members. So that’s a model from the
States that has been taken on wholesale by unions over here.
There might be individual organisers, paid officials, who are
more militant and they understand how to run campaigns, and
to do that you need to involve your members. But lots of reps
haven’t got a clue, they couldn’t organise their way out of a
paper bag. But, generally, they have targets and their targets
are about membership and getting recognition, so that is what
they focus on.
S: Where I work, a big retail chain, it is a bit of a specific case
because they got a partnership agreement. And, then, if you see
it only from outside you will say ‘ok, these unions just want to
be, you know, close to management, that is why they signed
that’. There is no collective bargaining as such, it’s all done
through a forum, 12 people decide what they pay deal of 200
thousand members. Can’t really vote on it, and you can’t go on
strike. But they say that a lot of shopworkers in the stores are
part-time students so ‘if we send out a ballot paper to vote on
the pay deal, we will only get 10 percent of the papers back’.
And then they say ‘this will look really weak’. So the company
said ‘what do you want’, and we were forced into this
partnership agreement, to just get the recognition. Obviously
you could have had regular meetings in the store and voting in
the store. That would get more than 10%, but the situation is
that most of the union votes to implement the policy that the
company already has, with some improvements, they help a lot
with training, the company does a lot of ‘mental health week’,
‘financial health week’, ‘child care week’, and then the union
can do their bit.
And the union basically does a bit of human resource
management. The company allow them to do the induction,
everyone has to sign a lot of papers anyway, the union guy
comes in and is like ‘oh, it’s good to be in the union’, and their
main argument, because they don’t have anything positive to
say like ‘we need strong collective bargaining’ kinda position,
‘we might have to go on strike’, is that ‘you have to be in the

union because of disciplinaries, you need a rep’. So they only
have a negative motivation. And that is why they also depend
on disciplinaries. So the boss, company management and
union are happy with the disciplinary regime. Because
management keeps the union busy, and the union can say ‘we
do something for you guys, because they do a lot of
disciplinaries here’. So that’s your only chance to get people in
the union. It’s the fear. And that is how they operate and they
get like, quite a lot of members. I mean it has gone down
because they did some bad deals, but in the last kind of 2-3
years, membership fell from about 55% of 1400 to now 46%,
so that’s quite a reduction. And yeah, people leave because of
the bad pay deals, but they stay because, you know, you might
need a rep during your disciplinary. As a rep you are caught
between wanting to help individual colleagues and thereby
betting to know them better on one side - and giving
legitimacy to this disciplinary process by making it look like a
court hearing, with you playing the lawyer. You really end up
disguising that in the end it is all about power and that the
whole process is a farce.
Q: So this connects to something else we briefly discussed
outside the warehouses. You said that the unions only sell fear,
not anything transformative. And this connects to something
that I have experienced a lot in work and other people have
experienced a lot, this idea of capitalist realism, to use a
succinct phrase, where people don’t imagine something
different. Do you see this in your workplaces, and if you see
this, is there any way we can challenge this?
T: So yeah, our union got recognition about 10-12 years ago.
And since then, the only wage increase that they’ve got is 10p
more than the minimum wage. So there’s been all that time
where the union has been ineffective, they haven’t engaged
their members, they haven’t balloted for a strike or even done
an indicative strike ballot, so I think that’s the background
against which people feel there’s no alternative. But this can
change quite fast. Since I’ve been an active rep in the union,
I’ve challenged union election results, we’ve organised street
protests outside the factory against something management has
done, we’ve rejected pay offers for being too low, we’ve started
a pay campaign sticking to our guns about asking for £1/hr
more for all workers. We keep saying: ’we can win this pound’,
‘we can do it’, which is challenging this long-standing mindset

of ‘nothing will change, nobody will do anything.’ It’s fair
enough to have to prove yourself after the union has been
rubbish for so long.
At the same time, the situation also needs the workers to be
pushing the union to be doing something and getting more
involved. I think these past bad union experiences, plus the
fact that they are scared because of the general social situation
and culture of fear and bullying inside the factory, mean they
don’t want to do anything, they lack the energy. All of these
things combine so that they kind of sit back. It is easy to
blame the union, but at the same time if you had an angry
workforce that was pushing the union, or if they were doing
their own thing, you would have a different dynamic. The
recent ‘strike’ action on the bank holiday shows that things
have shifted slightly. For this small group of workers, at least
the possibility to do something has emerged. The question
now is how to build on this.
Q: So this is like, everybody is angry. But it’s mostly confined
to the private sphere, you come home, you vent, you go back
to work the next day.
T: Actually at my workplace, everyone is angry all the time.
This is why there is a lot of bullying and stress, because I
mean, that anger, it’s every day. And people don’t actually
recognise it as stress, you know. They are swearing at each
other, it’s really impolite, and that’s the general culture. But
people wouldn’t necessarily say ‘this is a stressful workplace’
and relate to actually how the work is organised.
Q: Yes. So, a very hypothetical question, but how do you
create, or would it be possible to create this leap from, dealing
with your situation personally to making the connections and
dealing with it collectively?
S: The avenue of the union is blocked, because formally you
can’t do anything. They just do campaigning and they let you
sign the petition and these kind of things. So it would be,
discussion about work to rule, saying ‘ok, we put something
forward to management in whatever form’, pay demands and
such. Theoretically management can decide to pay us market
supplement, which means that they can pay a bit more if they
can’t recruit enough people, so, they could do that. Outside of
the collective agreement that they have with the union, they
could pay more. You have to have some discussions. Work to
rule…
T: It would require a lot of discipline and organisation. In
many workplaces that doesn’t exist. I think before then you
have to at least get people together. When we hold meetings,
people don’t come. But those meetings are important. I
organised a meeting for the cleaners, who were on the lowest
paygrade, and they were very pissed off about the last pay deal.
So I did a meeting specifically for them, because it was
possible for them to use health and safety a lot in what they
do, they use chemicals, and they need special training. They
did come for the first couple of meetings, but then they all
kind of faded away. I mean, the point is, if you organise
meetings you have to keep doing it and hopefully new people
will come or you will get some kind of new energy from
somewhere. And don’t give up on that. It is a good space for
discussion. And people feel like they are affecting the trajectory
of the union and union decisions.
And the social element is also one of the biggest things. The
company will always do a yearly coach trip to the beach.
Because a lot of these workers, they never go to the beach, lots
don’t own a car, so to take their family on a day out is a big
thing. And the company puts that on and everyone really loves
it. The union hasn’t done that, so this year I want to organise a
fun day, for people to see the local parks and people can bring
their kids, and then hopefully more women will come because
they can bring their kids to something. But it’s not like, ‘this is
a union thing and we are discussing union matters’, it’s more
just a kind of soft approach to kind of make people feel like
they are in a union, and then maybe they will come to a
meetings. You really have to start from scratch. The other
thing you could do is maybe go into the temples and stuff, but
we don’t wanna do that.
Q: So why don’t you wanna do that? It’s not a critical question,
mostly just for information. Because like, in America they do it
a lot, they go to religious organisations and try to work
together and stuff.
T: Maybe it is a kind of prejudice, isn’t it? Abviously you get
problems about, religious divisions amongst people. But also it
is like, a lot of the…

S: It isn’t a social space…
T: It is!
S: You don’t sit around, chat…
T: You do! Of course you do, there is nothing else to do
there… apart from pray. Cause you know, you eat there, it’s
like, the women will cook there, there are women’s committees
that are on the management board of the temple. There is a
committee that runs the temple, and you get groups of women
together doing that. Um, so it is a social space, but we are not
religious, it would be a bit weird to just go there and pretend
to be religious.
Q: It’s not about pretending. The way that it’s done, for
example I told to S before about the workers centers in the
US. It’s about collectives that have risen and risen until they
have their own space, and so then is the issue of ‘how do we
access immigrant workers’. So basically they are acting like a
union but without being a union, and they sometimes go to
churches of Latin American immigrants, and try to organize,
help with labour issues etc. And then the pastors, whatever
they are called, they present this alternative. So you have
solidarities that develop outside of the strictly…
S: Yeah but I mean, they are not like, stupid. They like to be
the managers of the flock.
Q: Of course, of course….
S: We know it from strikes in India, where these kind of local
village council, the union also approached them, but they also
like the companies, so they always kind of become the
manager of the strike. Same thing with Sri Lankan pub
workers in Paris, late 90s. They got some of the Sri Lankan
religious leaders in them. They became unofficial strike
leaders. They just wanted to kind of cement their own power
in the community. So you can’t instrumentalise them very
easily. If you use their space, they only let you do that at a
high cost. We never tried this, it’s the same with going into the
union. We are very critical of the unions and kind of, you can
only do as much as your union boss allows you. Temple or
church might be good to meet people maybe, but to address
the hierarchy of the religion, to say ‘can you mobilise your

people towards that aim’, I think it’s…
T: But maybe it would be, on a level below that, it could be,
‘could you just give us ten minutes at the end of your sermon
to basically talk about what we are doing’, because it’s like,
mainly people are religious. I mean, the Goans are very
Christian and they will go to church every Sunday, and the
Hindus, they love going. So maybe there could be a way of
doing it where we are not just going through the priest or
whatever.
Q: I understand that you are very cautious to giving a platform
to the reproduction of already existing hierarchies…
S+T: Yeah
S: Same thing with even IWW kind of stuff, you can talk
something about this ‘organic leaders’, I mean that…
T: Yeah there is this Jane MacAlevey book, ‘Organising for
Power’, she’s doing a critique of union organising in the last 50
years. And saying how this community organising model is
very flawed. And that there, the trajectory of the unions has
been quite on a more kind of campaigning side of things, more
media focused rather than ‘deep organising’. Part of this deep
organising model, we would agree with, is that she really
emphasises this thing about having organic leaders. Which she
says are not necessarily the most vocal people, and they usually
the most resistant to join the union but once you bring them
in, they bring everyone else. That is useful to have if you are
an outsider, if you are doing cold organising like we did in
that sandwich factory, we did rely on 2 or 3 of the more vocal
workers. The people listen to them. We don’t work there, we
don’t know what is going on really. But yeah, on the other
hand when you work there you know that a lot of these so
called leaders are also close to management, they become the
middle men, they speak both languages, they represent, people
rely on them, it’s more like a slow process of corruption.
S: But they are also patriarchal figures, and people don’t listen
to them just because they are so charismatic, but also because
maybe they can get you a better job in a different department,
or maybe they can get you a loan from, I don’t know, some
community charity…
T: Or get you your holiday…

S: Yeah, that’s also very short sighted but you know,
widespread, this idea of organic leaders.
T: Yeah, because if you got loads of workers who just want
someone to do something for them, it is not helpful that you
are reproducing that by saying ‘we need to focus on these
leaders’ who we just need to follow. Obviously long-term you
can say that creates its own dynamic and once people see that
something can change then more people might get more
confident or whatever…
S: But the problem is also that the left is short-sighted. They
don’t see how bigger strikes happen historically. Then, because
they think ‘it can only happen if you do a lot of step- by- step
organising’, they don’t see that a lot of things happen in big
leaps. By having this kind of idea that it can only happen by
small steps, you put some stones in the way of the next big
leap. If you base your organising on these kind of organic
leaders and community middle men, you think ‘yeah, we get
one more person or two more people’. But you put them in the
way of something that can come more organically and
collectively, maybe what people call spontaneously. The left
often helps to, basically, put up new barriers that seem in their
little view like, ‘ok, these are small steps towards organising’,
but in the long run they just become big stones that an actual
spontaneous strike would just trip over. So, in that sense, you
have to see everything in the long perspective. Do you create
new illusions, say ‘yeah we can get this kind of councilor
involved, or this kind of media person involved’? And on the
small level that you are organising, ‘these workers are too
scared’, its good to get like, John McDonnell or some kind of
Labour Party person coming to speak since it gives them
courage, but in the long run you just create another illusion.
And you create barriers in the future. So, I think you have to
bear that in mind when you are organising. It’s not like,
everything that is instrumental in your next step is politically
the right thing to do. You have to have a longer perspective.
Q: And there is like, organic leaders in that sense, for example,
in the food factory the GMB reps have come from within the
community but that doesn’t mean that they are actually
helping the struggle…
T: Yeah, they definitely are not. Actively not helping.

Q: They are actively not helping. So you believe they want to
maintain the situation as it is and the balance of power as it is.
T: Because they have to be seen to be controlling the workers,
I mean, when there is some kind of spontaneous eruption or
whatever, I have seen it, they take the people to the side and
talk them down.
Q: Can you talk a bit more about that? This is obviously very
important.
T: Yeah, there was a case where 3 ladies were moved from one
department to another, which is quite a big deal because they
were working for like 10 years in one department. You know
everyone, and then to just be moved from one day to the next
is really horrifying. And the management didn’t go through
any process, didn’t involve the union. So the women were
really pissed off, and they wanted to do something and kick up
a fuss, but, I remember seeing them shouting and having a go
at the main shop steward. He’s basically saying ‘I’ll sort it out
for you, but you just need to calm down and let the union sort
it out’. But it is also a way of deferring action, the reps often
have no clue what to do, so they just say, ‘leave it with me.’
And workers are kept waiting around, expecting things to get
fixed behind closed doors, but then getting frustrated that
nothing is happening and then they cancel their membership.
When there were rumors of a walkout after two workers were
suspended, the management approached the union, asking
them to participate in the management briefing to condemn
such action. In the past, I think the union would have done
this, which is why management felt confident to ask us. This
time though, the union refused. There are cases where
diffusing the situation is important though, namely if there is a
big chance of workers getting sacked which would cause
demoralisation amongst all workers.
Q: There is also, another thing you said before, about how
they are used to discipline the workers. How the union can
play a dual function, not only of disciplining the workers, but
also through these networks that have already developed, to
discipline the migrants as migrants. How do you target that?
OK, when I started this research, it was about barriers to
migrant unionisation, because I was working in Bradford, and

in Bradford, there are no unions in these places. Then I went
to Glasgow and I was like ‘OK, it’s a bit more complex than
that, but still overwhelmingly these places are completely un-
unionised’. Now I’m seeing the situation here and I’m talking
to you guys and it’s like, ‘OK, actually unionisation doesn’t
mean that much if it isn’t effective’.
T: I think, in the process of getting union recognition, this is
where, if you get it right, it saves you lots of problems down
the road. It’s difficult, because in order to get you your
recognition, you need like 3 or 4 militant workers, who will
somehow lead that effort, take on more responsibility and
galvanise other workers until you get a critical mass. But if
those 4 people end up getting a union position, they get sent
to this training, that training, spend less and less time doing
their actual job, management offers you a promotion and the
gap between you and regular workers gets bigger and bigger.
Q: So it is pretty interesting, the validity of what Bakunin said
that even just a little bit of power will make you start thinking
about how to maintain it rather than actually change things…
S: Unless you form a Slavic country…
Q: what happens if you from a Slavic country?
S: you are blessed! You from a Slavic nation…
Q: Hahahaha! Oh yes, yeah, that was when he was young
though, that was when he was young. But obviously that’s a
different story.
S: But about the leaders, you have to imagine a situation that
you might find in other countries, you might find in history,
when the working class was more on the offensive. At the
moment it seems like we need these leaders because workers
are so poor and victimised. But as soon as you have a strong
movement going on, the first thing that management wants is
someone to talk to, some leaders, someone that they can buy,
they can crush, someone they can put into prison or put into a
nice position, give them money, whatever. Just because our
situation is so pathetic, we don’t want to support in the minds
of workers that ‘you need leaders’, or ‘you need this kind of
things’, because that is the tool of management. At the
moment, it would be so good if you have these 3 women who

would magically bring everyone with them, but like, you want
to avoid that, and you want to undo this leadership. So, we
find that if you look at any situation, in India for example -
because there are a lot of wildcat strikes, because there are a
lot of workers that aren’t represented by unions- anytime that
someone goes on offence, management wants to bring the
union in. So obviously you can just hide the situation.
We find ourselves in a difficult situation, obviously we come
from a left communist tradition that is very critical of unions,
we find ourselves being union reps, but it is always a double
strategy. You say ‘ok, workers, tell the union this is what you
want to do’. If they don’t do it you have to do it yourself. So
basically just keep your independence and just say, ‘ok, the
union is still a social base, it is a formal representation’, and
prepare the workers that at some point they will have to go a
step ahead, prepare them already. That is how we deal with it.
T: It is also this balance, you need to set out what the illusions
are, without being too pessimistic and negative. You want to
encourage people, make them confident, feel optimistic and
stuff. This is why it’s difficult, for example with the Adelie
workers, we were trying to get this balance right. But I don’t
think we managed in the end because they lost interest. Maybe
we took things too fast, maybe we started about strikes too
soon, maybe we set it all out too early, and it’s a difficult
picture to get your head around.
Q: Based on your organising experience, what are the barriers
to migrant empowerment? Obviously it is a very general
question. Now it emerges that one key barrier is actually the
unions. At least, in this situation. I am interested in, concrete
things that are changeable through organising that we can
slowly start targeting to unpick the layers and layers and layers
of difficulties.
S: Get independence from all these middle class elements of
the community. The bosses, the…. Obviously there is a
material dependency, who gets you the job, who gets the job
for your relative, this kind of thing, but get in a position to say
that they are also part of the problem.
T: How would you relay that message?
S: For example, say that, these people, they help you, but they
do that with a certain class interest. Yes they get your cousin a
job, maybe, if your cousin doesn’t speak English, but they also
make him work 50 hours, below the minimum wage.
Otherwise, just don’t insist on the ‘migrant’ status. Sometimes,
it poses a concrete problem, but it shouldn’t be an identity. It
has many problems. Language, status, access to benefits, all
these you should address these concrete conditions rather than
saying ‘oh yeah, you are migrant’. Who cares? It is not the
main thing. Same as any kind of background. Address the
concrete issues rather than making it a category of workers.
Same as agency workers. I would never say ‘ok, let’s organise
as agency workers’. I would say ‘let’s organise as part of a
workforce that has specific problems’, rather than saying ‘we
are the agency workers’, ‘we are the cleaners’, because that’s
quick like that, people try to use the special category…
T: To basically get a bit ahead of another category. So basically
these cleaners, their whole argument was, ‘we should earn
more money, we shouldn’t be on the base rate like the
assembly line women, we work harder than them’. But it’s like,
no! What kind of argument is that?? You don’t work harder
then them, that’s a completely subjective point. At the same
time, there’s an argument to be made for getting groups of
workers doing the same job together so that they can discuss
the specifics of their jobs and how to use the health and safety
rules that apply specifically to them in order to put pressure
on the boss. But obviously workers have to come together to
bring pressure to bear from all departments, all fronts.
Q: When I started this research, I used the link ‘migrant
workers’ because that was my experience. And then as I went
and moved to Glasgow, I went to like 5 different places, I
started noticing that in Bradford, the migrant thing might play
a very big role, because there were very very strict distinctions.
In Glasgow it’s more like, everyone is on top of one another
and Scottish people are as precarious as migrants. But I would
say that, in terms of the thing that T was saying, concrete
conditions are crucial. Even though people are struggling as
components of the same system, this economic system is
designed to some extent in a way that makes it depend on
migrant labour. With a lot of interfeeding factors, so, for
example, the stereotype of the Polish plumber. People are
pushed to certain jobs, then these jobs become associated with
the populations performing them. At the same time, ,

legislation says that these jobs are low waged jobs and so they
can maintain profitability and competitiveness, it’s like a cycle.
So what I am trying to get at, is, how do you find, this is a
pretty important question for the movement in general to
answer, how do you find this balance between actually
targeting concrete conditions- the reason that I am focusing
on this part of the issue, ‘migrant workers’, is because I think
as a movement we can create a lot of damage to the system in
general if we organise workers in this specific sort of
occupations- how do you maintain that balance of not being
exclusive or, not falling into the trap of identity politics, but
still addressing structural features of the system? Features that
rely on migrant labour?
T: I.e.’ how do you deal with concrete situations where
migrants are in a structurally weaker position in general in the
labour market, and the fact that you don’t want to do it as a
sort of identity issue’?
S: You would have to address local work. I mean, explain the
situation. A lot of migrant workers who arrive here, be that
from Poland, they don’t know the history of working class
struggles here, they don’t know about struggles of Asian
workers, maybe they don’t know the colonial past, there is a
lot of things that come into the situation, they also don’t know
how they are used by the bosses. And just kind of explain, this
is the history, this is the context you are in. For example, when
they sent these Polish agency workers into Gate Gourmet, you
should have said ‘alright, you can shout ‘scabs’ at them’, but
you can also say, ‘you guys come into these situation with
these women from Punjab, this is the airline, this is the big
picture and this is you, and you were just recruited from
Poland, and that is the situation you are in, and obviously you
have got your specific situation’, you would have to explain
that to the local workers here- so these guys come from this
country, it has been shafted over the last years, unemployment
is so high, obviously they would work here for 7 euro’.
But that wouldn’t undo the clash of material situation. You say,
‘OK, in the long run, what are the commonalities’, what would
be a common aim, and, you know, try to see a bit further
down the road. How can you create a unity, but not just by
saying ‘despite everything just unite’, because obviously there
are different platforms, different positions. So the left would

have to play that kind of role. And then, say like ‘OK, if you
are in a weaker position, what does it mean? OK, you can’t go
on strike because you don’t have the resources. OK , you have
to take care of that’. You can’t expect everyone to take the
same step. If you are established, you have a house, you don’t
have to pay rent, you’ve lived here for 20 years, OK you can
talk louder about striking for 2 weeks. If you just arrived, you
spent 1000 euro to come here, in debt to the agency, you
wouldn’t do that. So having an inquiry, research into the
concrete situation and then say, OK, we have to address these
material differences in order to create equal footing. A lot of
things are in the way of that because the left operates with a
lot of moral categories, but not really with inquiries into the
material. They focus a lot on an ideology, rather than material
research. It is fairly easy to shout ‘no borders‘, but much more
difficult to actively try overcoming the problems and barriers -
and unearth the potentials - that each wave of migration
creates for local class struggle.
T: In the first meeting the new union organiser had with
management, he called them ‘racist’ because they had said they
were no longer going to speak to the incumbent union
organiser (who was Indian). The real reason the relationship
broke down was that this union guy was an aggressive bully
who it was impossible to have a discussion with.
Unfortunately, he also behaves this way to other union
members and union reps. The new union guy started talking
about racism because he wanted to make a bold first
impression on management. The workers really liked liked that
though, when he was labelling management as racist, because
they could understand that, like, yeah, ‘they are racist, they are
treating us badly because they are racist’. It’s an idea people
instantly relate to. But it wasn’t the truth. So yeah, it was a
quick win - workers were happy because they could channel
their anger against the white management, and the
management were put on the back foot. But the longer-term
consequences are that the incumbent rep still gets to behave
like a bully to everyone, he still has his job, the union haven’t
let him go. And also, it puts forward a simplified version of
events, you know. It’s patronising to workers. If you are
actually gonna talk honestly with workers about what is going
on, you can’t take that easy route.
Q: Yeah. In terms of the other thing that I mentioned, about

migrant labour being used by the system. In these occupations
you can broadly call them members of the working class,
meaning like warehouse work, precarious work, whatever.
Even if somebody was from a middle class background but has
ended up in these jobs, for the purposes of this discussion, you
know. However, you have a specific economic system that
relies on a combination of like, material needs, legislation,
stereotypes, as time passes people are associated with the
occupations that they do, so you send them to that place, you
send the other population to the other place, and the system
relies on that to maintain profits. So how do you challenge
that without invoking the migrant identity as the main, sort of,
criterion? You have to do a lot of political education obviously,
but like…
S: I mean, OK. There is one thing you can say that ‘there is
racism’ where people just identify you by your skin color.
Then there is institutional things, where you have a different
passport so you get a different access to labour market or to
flats or to benefits, ok. With this kind of idea of the ‘migrant’,
all kind of things are bound up that not all migrants fit inside.
There are some migrants that don’t look different, some
migrants have been here for 15 years, they have the same
status as British, and access to benefits. It’s a difficult category.
I would say like, look at concrete situations, as I said here, a
lot of the Asian community, would we still call them migrants
if they are born here? Maybe, migrant background, but
obviously they are often part of the exploiting class, so does it
help if you call them? Migrants? I don’t know.
You have to address the concrete problems. Now, post Brexit,
you will have another layer of unskilled workers coming in,
getting maybe only 1 year work visa, no access to benefits, and
you have to already tell people now that ‘oh you might think
that’s really good because these guys want to take your
benefits’ and things but, I mean, you might say to local people
‘listen’, the politicians tell the local people that yes, ‘there will
still be migration, but we will only take those people that we
really need and we won’t give them benefits’. But then you
would have to say ‘yeah, but these guys will be even more
under pressure to take any job and that will actually lower
wages because they feel like they have to accept the new job
without benefits as a backup’, so you have to find this special

category. But that is very clearly defined as legal category.
Q: OK. That’s very interesting, and I would argue that what
maintains the system in the US for example, is more whiteness
as a category that allows people to split themselves, to identify
as something different, and side with the oppressive
mechanisms, perhaps more so than racism. Racism and
whiteness are very connected to the system. So it is still
something that needs to be targeted. But we can have a debate
on that.
S: [inaudible] a lot of local white people who are working
class, think that everyone has a community, the Muslim
community, obviously they are also targeted but they also have
support, there is Black Lives Matter, they have a community,
and they think ‘just we don’t have a community’. This kind of
idea is a defensive kind of situation, but if it is not addressed
then it’s a problem. Actually, a poor white American, now they
talk about opiate crisis, things, but it mainly addresses all these
backward people. So it’s like, if you operate there, they also
want to operate with this ‘community’ type of…. ‘we are also a
special category’ or something, ‘represent us’, because
communities always got representation and they will find right
wing representation, because, obviously, the left, is also stuck
in the community box but they don’t want to represent them
because is an ugly community, so is kind of…
Q: OK, I have two more questions, and then, yeah, if you want
to add something, I allow you [laughing]. So one of the things
that is talked about a lot in like, radical academia and radical
theory, and is one of the most hotly debated concepts is the
concept of precarity. Everybody throws it around, it has given
a lot of people jobs and a lot of people money. What is your
analysis of that? What is precarity? If you care to answer, if
you don’t, it’s completely fine. I’m asking people because
everyone writes about it but nobody asks the people on the
ground, doing the organising, about how they feel about it, you
know?
T: It can mean lots of different things, doesn’t it? I think when
people think about precarious worker organising, they think of
agency or zero-hours workers, and it is more difficult to
organise because these people are more transient and… it
comes with its own problems. But in my work people feel

precarious because even though they have a permanent
contract they have worked for less than 2 years and they could
be sacked. You could be working there for over 2 years but
you still feel like you are in a precarious position, because you
have to earn a certain amount of money to bring you kid over
or your husband over. Precarity ends up not meaning much
unless you are more specific about what you mean by it.
S: I would say that is a smokescreen that is mainly used by
outsiders where you focus on the contractual side of things,
whereas I would always focus on where you are situated in
work process. For example, take Heathrow, obviously you have
a lot of precarious work at Heathrow, but the potential from
workers’ power point of view, not individual conditions,
precarity means…. You want to solve something and give it a
bit more stable kind of conditions. You focus on, kind of, the
legal deficiencies or something, so your solutions are, ‘if the
individual had a bit better contract’, but that is not our
interest. The interest is workers’ power. And then you look
like, you can have a zero hour contract in a vegan bakery and
you think like ‘OK, is that the same category of work as a zero
hours worker who is a baggage handler at Heathrow’? I would
say it doesn’t make sense. Only if you say that both situations
require the same type of organising because they focus on
precarity you would say ‘please, give us both, we are victims’.
So I would say that the main focus is always on how you
cooperate with these other workers. And if you are a
precarious baggage handler at Heathrow, then you cooperate
with British Airways staff who have much better pay but who
need your work, you cooperate with thousands of others of all
kind of categories and you should take that cooperation as
starting point of organisation and not the individual contract,
because that leads you only so far. It is already integrated, it is
not a form or prospect of organising that can lead to
massification. At the same time, obviously, these are
concrete….
T: It is such a big term that it can encompass anything from
that to that….
S: Still, to describe the tendency in the class, contractual
relations describe a power relation in the end. Say ‘OK, why
do these conditions exist’? But is also the weakness to a certain
degree of a system. The system cannot offer you pension,

stable future, they know that their own system is in crisis.
They can’t really plan your future for you for the next 40
years. So we can also say that there is a chance, because the
worker will be less attached to a specific company. Not like
‘yeah I am a British Airway worker with special entitlements’,
but ‘I am just a worker, I don’t have professional pride, I got
no prospects’. That is more radical than all these kind of ‘I am
attached to my stable future in this company’ mentalities. The
left is always looking for victims.
T: I find you like immiseration theory [laughs]
S: No, this is massification theory! It’s just saying, that isa
normal working class conditions, it’s saying that all we have
from the 60s…
T: You are almost happy that everyone is becoming more
precarious [laughs]
S: No, no, but it is the system. You shouldn’t make the system
stronger than it is. It’s not like they just put us in precarity
because, you know…
T: We’re all victims….
S: Yeah. But up until relatively recently, this was the normal
condition. It changed in the 60s-80s, when full employment
became an actual possibility that people strived for, when the
economy became more stable in general, but that is not the
normal proletarian reality. By labelling something as
‘precarious’, you are making it an exception, which it is not, it
is the normal proletarian condition.
T: Maybe it came into existence when suddenly middle class
became declassified, and suddenly teachers were not in a job
for life, or university lecturers, and suddenly everyone loved
precarity.
S: Yeah, I mean…
Q: I broadly agree with what you are saying. However, there is
some radical theorists espousing the concept who say that the
onslaught or the reimergence of precarity as opposed to
Fordist security, presents opportunities… For example we were
in a Mayday march in Leeds some years ago, and I was
standing with a bloc that had a banner that said ‘Workers

against Work’, and we got attacked by some old miners,
because ‘how dare you say that, I am proud of my….’. And we
were explaining, ‘are you proud for having fucked your lungs
up?’, you know, but it wasn’t about that. So right now, the
opportunities presented by ‘precarity’ is that there is a de-
identification with the jobs, as you said before. Do you actually
see that in your organising?
S: Yeah, maybe a bit. No one gives a fuck, but it’s not always
good, is it?
T: I feel like people do want to be proud of their jobs, you
know, it’s crap to spend all day on the assembly line, getting
cramp or a bad back or whatever, and then you see half the
stuff you’re making falling on the floor! Or you see, it’s so
badly made that they’re going to chuck it, they’ll have cooked
it, packaged it and then they’ll chuck it in the bin. And people
vocalise that on the line, like ‘what, this is totally pointless’,
what we’re doing. And then you either become more
demoralised, or that anger spurs you to do something. But, as
you can see, not a massive amount is happening generally. It is
tending more towards demoralisation, but obviously it doesn’t
always have to be that way and things can change quickly.
S: On one hand, in the 60s, they expressed a widespread
feeling amongst the working class, all of this assembly line
work, ‘there is nothing to identify with, it’s not something that
you like doing, it’s not something that you would like to self-
manage, the product you produce is just a car part’. I mean
that they gave you a bit of freedom but in general a lot of stuff
they produced, they didn’t identify with. So to say like, ‘fuck
work’, it was a widespread collective feeling, and it was maybe
more radical than the previous generation. But in general,
young workers wanted to leave all of that, that life. And it
wasn’t like previous skilled workers who thought simply ‘self
management of the railway or construction’. Locomotives and
you know, machines, they had specific skills and had an idea
that work can be quite nice. But at the same time if you think
about workers as not just being a mass of people who are
nihilistic and say like ‘fuck all this’, but think like, ‘we are the
producers in the end’. I mean, we have a shit wage but we
produce everything from this table to…. And if we want to
think about a different society, obviously the question is, it
won’t just come out of thin air. It has something to do with

the way we produce now. Some people, these kind of nihilistic,
super-radicals say ‘oh completely break capitalism, there is
nothing to do, the new system must be completely different’. I
mean yeah, it has to be different but it still has to be based on,
you know,
T: We have to produce what we need to live!
S: Yeah. Somewhere on the level of productivity that we have
reached. A lot has to be modified and changed, but like… so to
say, yeah, to kind of have this, this, it is quite an intellectual
abstraction ‘fuck work’. Yeah fuck work, but…
T: Yeah, but it’s interesting that the miner said that, because, it
also comes in the context where a lot of old people are saying
‘oh young people are just wimps, they don’t do anything
anyway, we were doing all the work, and now they are just
floating around, like, doing these media/computer things….’ So
probably that has some part in their reaction.
S: They thought the same thing about the unskilled workers of
the 60s, they called it ‘mickey mouse workers, you don’t know
anything’.
T: That was more in context of ‘you’re never going to
organise, because you are not skilled’.
S: I think it is important to talk to workers about their specific
work, not just saying ‘it’s all crap’. Working for example
making ready meals, is this good or bad? You don’t want to
glorify sitting in your kitchen doing your every meal for you
and your partner and your children, that is the basis of, kind
of, a lot of bullshit.
Q: Yeah, nuclear family etc.
S: Yeah. Same time, you know, to have a hundred people
producing food for 5000, yeah maybe not a bad idea, if it is
not always the same 100 and if it isn’t done on an assembly
line. But we have to think about, ‘OK, how do we socialise
how we make food’, you know.
T: My experience is that the general drive of people is that
they want to do a good job. They are not going in thinking
‘ah, this is crap, what I’m doing is crap’. You can’t last like that.
And the frustration comes at the point where you can’t do a

good job, despite your efforts, because you haven’t got the
right tools, everything is falling apart, you don’t have enough
people, and then people get stressed and take it out on other
people. The initial compulsion though is: ‘I want to do a
decent job, but can’t because of reasons beyond my control.’
S: There would be a strong criticism to make, because it is not
external. To say like, ‘OK, management also says we are
supposed to do a good job, quality and all that, but their own
system of maximising productivity doesn’t work’. That is a
concrete contradiction. If you talk about contradictions and
class consciousness, these are contradictions that are, they are
experiences, they are concrete, you don’t have to read a lot of
books to understand quite fundamental contradictions of the
system. So… in that sense, yeah, it’s important.
Q: But there is also a contradiction from the other side. To go
back to the example of the banner, what we were meaning, I
realise now that it was short sighted and not politically
mature, but what I guess the people who made the banner
were meaning was ‘We are workers and we are against
alienating labour’.
T: Yeah. But that would have been a way longer banner
[laughs]
S: Then the miner wouldn’t have said anything because they
wouldn’t have an issue!
Q: Yeah, but, now, you have a sort of idea where many
workers…. It is a contradiction, now alienating labour has
been made worst by the experience of insecurity, compared to
Fordism, to such an extent that some people actually want it.
So for example, I remember a warehouse I was at. That
permanent contract was like, you know, like a child that sees a
huge ice cream from far away. You are going towards this
golden, mythical goal. And it is much harder to organise
against that, because if you are talking about the permanent
workers, they have made so much effort to reach that status.
S: Yeah, people run after these kind of badges and whatever.
Yeah, permanent might mean you are on 30% more. I can
understand why people think, ‘ok, for a year or 8 months I just
work very hard, don’t go sick, and then I’ve got a permanent
job and earn 30% more’. For someone who just arrived from a
country, that is a proper career step.
T: But on the flipside, you have people who have started as
agency, they’ve been agency for like 3 years, and they don’t
want a permanent contract now. They’re scared of being tied
down, not having the chance to take a month long holiday to
visit family back home. It has changed their relationship to
work in that sense, they feel more acutely aware of the
restrictions that work imposes on life.
S: But in general, who is dominating the discourse about
work? It’s mainly intellectuals. And then you have, anti-worker
type of discourse of the 80s. And then deindustrialisation.
Then you have automation debate. Basically, the amount of
just manual normal labour that is still being done is completely
sidelined by modern debate. Even in the Left, they say ‘why
should we talk about it, we will be automated anyway’. That’s
bollocks. Just from capitalist dynamics, the investment rates
are very low, they don’t invest into machinery. At the moment,
why is there a crisis in full employment, nearly? Because they
rather invest in £8 an hour workforce that they can get rid of
rather than having expensive machines. So, if you, we did one
pamphlet were we looked at, we called it ‘essential work’ in the
sense that, something that produces services or goods that are
somehow, keep us alive. And you can question it, whether we
need certain things, products, but there are still about 14
million people in the UK who produce newspapers, or are
nurses. Obviously a lot of them are not steel workers as such,
but they are industrial manual labour. And that is not reflected
in the left, and I would say, obviously a lot of ideas still come
from academia, but the real knowledge that is there, to say
‘OK, we not only protest and ask for a different democracy,
but we actually change things’, that will come from these 14
million people who do that every day. And they are not part of
the discussion. Also, when it comes to climate change, it’s all
like regulation, the state. At the moment, the debate is really
like, either it’s experts and entrepreneurs, these kind of young
green kind of people with clever ideas, or it’s the state do the
regulation, but it’s not like….
T: Well apart from the minicab drivers, which is quite
interesting, you know these people who are subject to this £12
charge to work within London. If they have a Diesel. It
displays this tension between like, the Left position is

obviously pro-environment, they don’t really know what to do
with this. And I was speaking with one friend, she just didn’t
understand what the IWGB were doing supporting these
workers, because in her mind it is a good thing, it should be
more expensive to drive those cars, you know, it is really bad
for the environment. But then I think, you could obviously say
‘yeah well, but the state should then pay for this, you know,
they should be able to trade in their car for a new one, they
shouldn’t have to pay’.
S: Which is polluting the environment quite a lot. If you
replace, because it is only 6 years old, with a new one, that is,
just the production of a car, it’s just like…but anyway…
T: What’s your solution then, just keep on driving?
S: No, I am just like, I just state that when people talk about
‘oh, what to do with climate change’, its either this kind of ‘we
need to ask the scientists and experts-’talk or this ‘the state has
to intervene and pass the right laws’-talk, but there is not like,
people who are actually, producing material goods that can
talk about how all that is happening and where all the waste is,
you know? It’s a bit, a sidelining of manual labour….
Q: I am finished, is there anything else that you would like to
add, to discuss?
S: Organising for what? Obviously in America, there is a lot of
debate about this base-building, coming out of more student
circles, who say ‘yeah, all this kind of new parliamentarian
politics may be fine, but what about getting rooted’, so they do
this kind of base-building organising. Also a kind of Maoist
kind of idea, we go to the people and we give them some food,
and like, tenants union, so more like, what is organising,
organising for what? And how? With what political aims?
What do we, how do we see the day to day organising in
relation to a class movement? Do we just see it as a
continuation, do we see it as a role of an organisation, what is
an organisation, what is revolution? Large parts of the left -
from Corbyn-followers to Leninists to general strike anarchists
- see organising from an instrumentalist point of view: we
need the economic strength of the workers in order to put
have clout for political change. Whereas we would say that the
social production process and the form of how workers
organise is the main political arena. It’s not mainly about pay
and conditions - if we want a different society then the
divisions and hierarchies between intellectual and manual
labour, production and reproduction and so on have to be
changed materially. This is political! And only a working class
movement can bring about these changes. To sum up: you can
organise people in campaigns for better pay and as a pressure
group for political change or you can focus on building self-
organised class power with the main aim - apart from better
conditions - to undo management command and hierarchies
within the class. As a preparation for an insurrectionist take-
over and transformation of the means of production! Both
strategies will talk about organising, but with quite
fundamentally different form, content and goals.
[This interview was conducted in the course of Panos
Theodoropoulos’s PhD research into unions, migrant workers
and labour struggles in the UK. We are releasing it because we
consider that this text holds some important ideas and
discussions which can be useful contributions in the ongoing
debates around issues such as organizing, trade unions,
migrant workers, and political theory.]
organisation, workplace activity,

United Kingdom, Angry Workers of the World
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A IWW comrade and researcher asked us questions about our

Q: Do you want to give me a brief description of the group?

T: We are a collective based in West London, we moved here 5

making links with international groups or groups doing

70% of the wage of the permanents. Half of the permanents

permanents. So some people put forward the demand, and the

permanents with agency staff to save some money. The

Q: And these are migrant workers?

solidarity network cases where new migrants are paid below

What sort of concrete organising methods do you use other

the GMB strategy is to focus more on developing individual

necessary for a collective like yourselves to fill the gap when

‘we might have to go on strike’, is that ‘you have to be in the

‘we can do it’, which is challenging this long-standing mindset

is like, a lot of the…

the hierarchy of the religion, to say ‘can you mobilise your

T: Or get you your holiday…

T: Yeah, they definitely are not. Actively not helping.

migrant unionisation, because I was working in Bradford, and

moment, it would be so good if you have these 3 women who

the populations performing them. At the same time, ,

are different platforms, different positions. So the left would

Q: Yeah. In terms of the other thing that I mentioned, about

without benefits as a backup’, so you have to find this special

comes with its own problems. But in my work people feel

degree of a system. The system cannot offer you pension,

standing with a bloc that had a banner that said ‘Workers

won’t just come out of thin air. It has something to do with

And the frustration comes at the point where you can’t do a

displays this tension between like, the Left position is

organisation, workplace activity,

Recupera el poder. Espacio para From Solidarity Networks to

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Workers' power at Heathrow Pushing Dust: Work Report

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