LOCKED OUT Gate Gourmet workers are to march through Southall on Sunday December 4th to demand that the TGWU makes their dispute official and mobilises the trade unions to take action to return every locked out worker to their job.
Chamnan Rattu told News Line: ‘We want everyone to join us on the march. We are assembling at Beresford Road at 1.00 pm.
‘We want our jobs back on our old terms and conditions and we want the TGWU leaders to start fighting for us. They represent us, not Gate Gourmet.’
Lakhvinder Saran said: ‘We are very happy to be marching through Southall where we have so much support and where many of us live.’
She added: ‘The union leaders are trying to divide the workers. They want to let the company get away with everything that they have done.
‘They are telling people that those the company takes back will go back under their old terms and conditions.
‘This is not true. The people who have been for interviews are being told that it will be under new terms and conditions. They will have to go back under the “Survival Plan”. That means flexible working.
‘I said to Gold (T&G national secretary) on Tuesday, you are doing everything for the company and nothing for us. He had no answer.’
Parmjit Bains said: ‘The company are openly saying that if we want our jobs back we will have to follow the Survival Plan. It is the union leaders who are saying that we would go back under our old terms and conditions.
‘I am advising my friends that we have to stand firm and win proper reinstatement on our original terms and conditions, plus our lost wages and compensation for unfair dismissal, at our employment tribunal.
‘We want the union leaders to stop working for the company and start working for the members.’
Locked out workers were saying yesterday that 164 of them have been made compulsorily redundant not 144 as its states in the Compromise Agreement.
Parmjit Bains commented, ‘Gate Gourmet does what it wants. It even breaks the deal that it drew up, and the TGWU leaders do nothing except tell us to sign away all of our rights.
‘Woodley and Gold may well be slaves of the bosses we are not.’
