YESTERDAY the TGWU leaders produced their statement of full support for the Sainsbury family in the battle to keep out the Texas Pacific-backed raiding party of venture capitalists.
The union statement said: ‘The Transport and General Workers Union today backed the Sainsbury family’s hostile position to the private equity bid for the supermarket chain. The union also pledged to continue to oppose the bid with every means at its disposal.’
The T&G has 25,000 members in Sainsbury and as Brian Revell is quoted as saying: ‘The private equity cartel of CVC, Blackstone and Texas Pacific will borrow the money to buy the shares and will, if successful, almost certainly sell the land and property as they “shake the company like a piggy bank” to extract as much as they can for their shareholders and partners’.
However, the Sainsbury clan is not opposed to the venture capitalists as a principle. They have let it be known that they will not sell out unless the price is raised from £5.80 to £6 a share.
One of the hold-outs is Lord David Sainsbury of Turville, the Blairite ex-science minister who resigned from the government in 2006 after supporting every one of the government’s anti-working class policies. His ‘loyalty’ to the workforce may not survive a 20 pence increase in share price.
TGWU members at Sainsbury need a fighting leadership. They need a T&G leadership that will express its absolute determination to use the power of their union to defend their wages, jobs and basic rights against not only the venture capitalists but against all sections of the capitalist class.
Instead, the TGWU statement says: ‘Revell added that the union had witnessed the ongoing debate on private equity and said it is clear that these companies do not have a consensus of support within society. The debate, he continued, has far to go and must conclude with legislation to regulate their power which took account of all stakeholders, not just the privileged elite who are partners in these firms.’
The union leaders decline to use the strength of the unions to defeat the venture capitalists, and instead rely on legal measures – laws to be passed by Labour governments. This is never going to happen since the Blair-Brown Labour leadership supports the ‘right’ of these capitalists to do what they do.
In fact, the T&G leaders have not just witnessed the ongoing debate on private equity, they are old friends of the Texas Pacific vultures.
They made their relationship with Texas Pacific when, on August 10 and 11th 2005, Texas Pacific sacked 800 workers at its Gate Gourmet caterers by megaphone, after engineering a provocation in the plant.
When BA’s baggage handlers at Heathrow came out in support of the Gate Gourmet sacked workers, they were sent back to work by Tony Woodley.
Then after making a fuss of the locked-out workers at the TUC 2005 Congress, Woodley helped by Brendan Barber shamelessly sold the Gate Gourmet workers out, signing a compromise agreement that accepted hundreds of sackings and the company survival plan.
They also tried to get every sacked worker to accept that they would give up their legal employment rights as the price for getting a pittance as compensation.
These leaders refused to make the struggle official from the start, refused to pay strike pay, and refused even to call a national demonstration, as did the Irish TUC to win the Irish Ferries dispute.
Finally, Woodley stopped all hardship payments in January 2006!
Texas Pacific publicly thanked Brendan Barber for supporting them in the negotiations and pledged to work closely with the TGWU leaders from there on. Having tested out the TGWU leaders at Gate Gourmet, Texas Pacific is now moving in to try and grab a much bigger prize.
The Woodley leadership has to go and the TGWU and the whole trade union movement has got to be lined up to defend the Sainsbury workers with national industrial action.
The Gate Gourmet dispute must also be reopened. The unions must demand the return of all of the sacked workers to their jobs on their old terms and conditions.
