YESTERDAY the leadership of the TGWU refused entry, as visitors, to the TUC Congress to some 20 locked out Gate Gourmet workers who have refused to sign the notorious Compromise Agreement.
This is the deal that has provided Gate Gourmet with a trade union license to operate a virtual slave labour plant at Heathrow.
What has placed these mainly women workers beyond the pale as far as Woodley and Hart are concerned, is that they decided to fight Gate Gourmet not capitulate to it.
They are not only taking their cases to an Employment Tribunal for compensation, they are demanding that their dispute be made official because they intend to win their jobs back on their old terms and conditions. These are the terms and conditions that Woodley and the TGWU leaders sold out to the US ‘gangster capitalist’, to use Woodley’s description of the employer.
They are better and more principled trade unionists than Woodley and the other capitulators to Gate Gourmet will ever be.
It is ironic that the TGWU leader was yesterday moving a resolution at the TUC Congress that condemns sweetheart deals with employers, when he gave Gate Gourmet the mother of all sweetheart deals, a deal that was made in heaven if you were a boss and hell if you were a worker.
The compromise agreement that the TGWU leaders and TUC leader Brendan Barber drew up for Gate Gourmet agreed to 144 compulsory redundancies and over 400 voluntary redundancies.
It agreed compensation payments for those who were about to be made jobless, but only if everybody signed the compromise agreement.
They were signing to accept the company’s ‘survival plan’, and that those who were to lose their jobs would not seek work with Gate Gourmet or any of its associate companies, and that the whole workforce would not take any cases to Employment Tribunals or to the criminal courts. This was to protect the company, which faced allegations of alleged assaults on workers, false imprisonment and racial discrimination.
The Agreement was a real sweetheart, since it put the whole workforce into handcuffs. Everyone would have to sign the deal or nobody would get compensation or re-engagement.
No wonder the TGWU were too ashamed to allow the locked out Gate Gourmet workers into the Congress as visitors to listen to their strong words against sweetheart deals.
At Heathrow, to their eternal credit, the workers rose up and over 400 refused to sign the compromise agreement, demanding access to tribunals and a fight to win back their jobs.
The TGWU leaders opposed this liberation movement and sought to pressure the workers into signing.
When just over 200 workers had signed the deal they stopped the union hardship payments to the rest.
After this workers’ rebellion, Gate Gourmet and its trade union sweetheart made the best of a bad situation and decided that they had to change the line that everybody would have to sign or nobody would get compensation.
Instead, the sweethearts began a frantic struggle to get as many workers to sign as possible, to cut the number of tribunal cases to a minimum.
Over 100 workers resisted this onslaught and their claims are to be heard by the Employment Tribunal.
However, they have not stopped campaigning for a return to their jobs on their old terms and conditions.
Every day they meet workers from Gate Gourmet, some of whom signed the compromise agreement under TGWU pressure, who now say that they are working in a hell-hole, and deeply regret what they did.
The locked out Gate Gourmet workers who are fighting on are a credit to the TUC-affiliated trade unions. They must be given 100 per cent support by Congress delegates, while those who kept them out must be treated with the contempt that their action deserves.
