Locked out Gate Gourmet workers are looking forward to their six months anniversary picket this Friday between 1.30pm and 2.30pm.
They have been picketing at the Beacon Roundabout, Beacon Road, near Heathrow airport Terminal 4, every day since 10th August last year.
Mrs Asha Varma said: ‘We want supporters to come and join us this Friday and fight with us.
‘We need them to tell our union leaders to restore our hardship payments which they stopped on January 6th.
‘We need weekly hardship payments until our struggle is over.
‘It’s completely wrong that the union should stop paying it now.
‘I’ve been a member of this union since 1984 and I’ve still got my original card back home.
‘All my colleagues are also long-standing members.
‘The union officers have put so much pressure on all of us to sign the Compromise Agreement but we can’t sign because it give the company everything it wants and lets them get away with what they did.’
Mrs Kuldeep Hotti added: ‘We are picketing every day and we are all going to our employment tribunal where we are claiming unfair dismissal and demanding full compensation for all the money we have lost since we were locked out on the 10th August.
‘We also want the employment tribunal to tell the company to reinstate us on our original terms and conditions.
‘We need the union to support us in every way. It must restore our hardship payments.’
Mrs Mohinder Grewal told News Line: ‘The union should be looking after its members not the bully bosses.
‘We pay £1.09 subs every month as locked out members. Before that, when we were inside, we paid over £10 per month.
‘We believe in the union that’s why we are so angry with these leaders who have tried to sell us out. But we are not slaves and we won’t be sold.
‘I am contacting all my friends to ask them to join us on our six months anniversary picket.
‘We want people to take up our struggle and make the union fight for us.
‘We want reinstatement on our original terms and conditions, not re-engagement under the company’s slave labour Survival Plan.’
• Second news story
LONDON UNDERGROUND STRIKE BALLOT
AROUND 5,000 more RMT members on London Underground are to be balloted for strike action in an escalation of a dispute over the company’s failure to resolve a wide range of industrial-relations issues, the rail union announced yesterday.
It added in a statement: ‘RMT is already balloting its 1,500 Tube driver members, alongside sister union Aslef, over issues that include policy on signals passed at danger (Spads), health and safety, bargaining arrangements, harassment, discipline, denial of representation rights and imposition of excessive punishments.’
The drivers’ ballot will close this Thursday (February 9), and the ballot of all other grades will close on February 23rd.
RMT general secretary Bob Crow said: ‘London Underground management’s attempts to impose rather than negotiate have undermined industrial relations right across the company.
‘The issues affecting train operators remain to be resolved, and the RMT executive has now agreed to ballot all other Tube members over LUL’s attempts to impose, without negotiation, changes in attendance, disciplinary and harassment procedures.
‘For all its fine talk about industrial relations, LUL is ignoring its own procedures and trying to impose changes and bypass its established negotiating machinery.
‘After months of trying to stop these attacks it has become clear that the only path left open to us is to ballot our entire Tube membership for industrial action, and we have given London Underground notice to that effect.’
