SBBS is a broadly satirical, polemical website. That means I say things which aren’t necessarily my literal views, but are extreme exaggerations of them, in order to provoke debate and general amusement. When this concerns airline labour disputes:
1) It makes absolutely no sense for an airline to own its own kitchens;
2) Nobody could deny that BA and Gate Gourmet both have rubbish, overpaid management;
3) £12k for a basic catering job is both well-above-average and entirely-livable-on (having had to live on £12k in full-time jobs before, yay for Aldi and Argos…)
4) While I’m loath to admit that British management are competent in general, the suggestion that we have proportionately few world-class companies is laughable;
5) I’m all for trade unionists and workers in general (whether they’re aviators or investment bankers) compelling their employers to pay them high wages by limiting the supply of labour, but don’t view doing so as a Morally Good Thing.
That is all.
1)
I would have thought that the GG dispute, in which an airline was grounded because of a dispute in the kitchens – over which the airline can exert no control precisely because it doesn’t own them – and therefore which can seriously damage their business… demonstrates at least one sensible reason for an airline to own it’s own kitchens.
I can think of several others too, as it happens. But then – having rescued a major company employing many thousands of people, which was being bankrupted by a foolish decision to outsource certain items – I guess I have a different view of outsourcing. But I’d argue mine’s pretty damn valid and certainly not without "sense".
2)
Damn straight.
3)
I’m not sure what the average salary for a London-based catering worker is, to be honest, and google seems less than helpful today. But if 12K is "well-above-average" then I’m Imelda Marcos. It may be "above average", but it can’t be by much, because 12K is actually getting damn close to entirely-UNlivable-on in London (roughly 180 quid / week after tax… that wouldn’t pay my rent in London and still leave enough for luxuries like food and electricity… and I don’t live in a great place. And forget about getting onto the property ladder on 12K). Yeah, you can scrape by on it, but "well-above-average"? I don’t think so.
4 & 5)
Can’t argue with them.
I’m a big fan of this site and your writing. And I love the polemical and satirical aspects of it, but calling people "work shy tossers" because they request better conditions or pay seems like a low blow even within that context.
Now if you’d called management "a bunch of sadistic, violent work-shy tossers with no morals and a prediliction for little boys" then that’d be different of course.
Britain does have proportionally fewer world class companies than other countries. The reason HSBC and Vodafone are talked of os often is the dearth of British companies like this. Banking the clasic sector where British banks have been pushed out almost completely, and city group witha maret cap of 270bn is about 3.5x the size of HSBC…
12k is not a great wage, and certainly not well above average…
it does indeed make sense for an airline to own its own kitchens… but it also makes sense to ensure your suppliers don’t leave you with 14 hour flights and sandwhiches and coke for all the business class/economy class passengers
saving £1 here and there on the meals doesn’t fundamentally change BA’s business model or economics… the changes it needs to make are farther reaching and rely on the airline being smaller in the future…
being polemical is one thing but suggesting that people should lose their jobs as they rise above minimum wage status is neither funny, clever or polemical… for these workers this is still a tragedy and one that a long term solution could have avoided
Jim – I suspect you’re right; I should’ve been more vile about management and less vile about the workers. The coverage I was reading broadly took the pro-worker line, while my actual views are fairly both-houses-plague-y. 12K is well above average for foodservice/food preparation, not for the economy overall.
Jeremy – the only non-US companies in the FT global top 20 (broadly by market cap) are BP, Shell, GSK, Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo. In the rest of the top 100 list you’ve got firms like HSBC, AstraZeneca, Unilever, Barclays…
Overall, while the Dutch’s half-share in Shell and Unilever leaves them the Biggest Corporates Per Capita crown, the UK is second only to the US in terms of total numbers, despite having a far lower GDP than Japan or Germany and an equivalent GDP to France or Italy.
John, as a matter of interest, what is the average wage for a food-service employee in London?
I’m all for trade unionists and workers in general (whether they’re aviators or investment bankers) compelling their employers to pay them high wages by limiting the supply of labour, but don’t view doing so as a Morally Good Thing.
You didn’t answer me in the thread below. Why is it a morally good thing for employers to compel their employees to accept low wages (or leave), by increasing the supply of unskilled labour through a lax immigration system?
£12,000 does not sound too far above average for catering in London. Not sure though, anybody got any figures?
£12,000 is pretty difficult to live on in London these days. Its one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Workers cannot be faulted for trying to protect that wage, in my opinion. In this example, you gotta be with the workers from a basic humanitarian angle, surely?
Good grief.
No comment on the rest, but:
I’ve lived on less than £12k, but it doesn’t make it a decent wage. It’s a crap wage. For any job. Especially in London. There’s no excuse for wages to be so low when idiots who do next to fuck all get million pound bonuses.
Long time since I worked in catering in London (or anywhere else for that matter) but for food prep jobs/pub staff that sort of thing minimum wage is about right.
12k is 230 per week (before tax) and that’s well above min.
It’s also true that Heathrow is not exactly central London. Hayes/ etc are markedly cheaper in rents etc.
No, I wouldn’t want to live on that sum (again) but John’s right, it’s above average for that trade/sector.
Meaders and My Way of Thinking have good posts on Gate Gourmet.
http://deadmenleft.blogspot.com/2005/08/known-for-his-patterned-socks.html
http://mywayofthinking.blogs.com/thoughts/2005/08/gate_gourmet_ar.html
Texas Pacific Group owns GG, and TPG Head honcho David Bonderman sits on a fortune of $6 billion.
TGP want to sell GG. But first they need to restucture it, and introduce a cheaper workforce. They have already been caught formulating plans to provoke strikes, sack the workforce and fill the jobs with cheaper workers. TGP have admitted they formulated such plans.
Same old story. Screw the workers so a bunch of bastards can get even fatter and richer.
Yes, see today’s Daily Mirror:
http://tinyurl.com/987vr
Er thats because FTSE measures stocks traded on London… so if you don’t trade on the LSE or have ADR’s it won’t pick you up… BP is the worlds 3rd largest company… but its a steep drop down then to HSBC which isn’t even in the top 20
its no real surprise there is a dearth of German and Italian companies on the London stock exchange… if you go to Italy there aren’t many UK companies listed their either
my point was more as well what sectors we are competing in … name me one seriously heavyweight UK technology company… or a bank beyond HSBC? or automotive? we are a services based economy because British management are poor at investing
…we are a services based economy because British management are poor at investing
…which, in perverse fashion, we have to pretend is a great advantage of some sort. (ESRC report here, fig.4, on lagging British capital investment; DTI report, chart 3.2, showing private investment on a slide since 1998.)
The further point with service sector output being that it’s notoriously "uncompetitive", or at least difficult to price – highly differentiated products, with indeterminate prior value, and often intrinsically untradeable (eg hairdressing in London has to be done in London, people won’t fly to Mumbai or somewhere.) The situation is changing, obviously, but it’s a very recent development compared to thousands of years of commodity trading.
calling people "work shy tossers" because they request better conditions or pay seems like a low blow
It wasn’t even that – he was calling them "work shy tossers" for merely wanting to stay on their current pay and conditions.
John,
You constantly engage in overblown polemic against all things right-wing, but as soon as you do the same to some leftist idol, you feel the need justify it. Whatever happened to radical centrist objectivity?
Jezza: the FT Global 500 is, err, global. It isn’t the same as the FTSE; it includes companies quoted on all stock exchanges globally. And ARM and Standard Chartered are a world-leading tech firm and another highly successful bank, respectively. We don’t have much British-owned automotive capacity any more, which is testament to the wisdom of British investors given the massive overcapacity and lossmaking that characterises the automotive industry (we do still have a large, foreign-owned automotive industry, which employs skilled British workers and squanders Japanese, American and French shareholders’ capital…)
Burn the workers: yup, that’s probably a fair point. In general, I find lefties more agreeable types than authoritarian-righties, so dislike upsetting them quite so much.
You said the FT 20 and they have a global index which I checked against… anyway your results are somewhat different to the Boomberg Market Cap numbers I have checked… BP is at 3 with Chevron and GE above it… GSK is followed by HSBC… but its kind of an irrelevant measure because there are stuff all Chinese companies etc and it doesn’t take into account state owned enterprises
ARM is a joke of company… seriously a joke… the shares are for professional investors only… it simply lacks the capacity to invest in next generation chips… Stadard Chartered is not a highly successful bank (bottom quartile ROE and growth figures) it is simply too odd to buy and strip
not all car manufacturing firms are unprofitable… ie BMW… large mass produced American firms are (although GE is profitable when finance is taken into account)
how many world calss companies have UK management created recently? its a very small number and I am struggling to think of any decent ones … has never made an accounting profit… and its losing cash hand over fist in Japan and has no American strategy
I bet you can tell me how much dead cash Cadbury has piled into the drinks market… when they sell it this year they will have made no money on it (risk adjusted)
There are several points I think need to be made.
1) Why did the baggage handlers take unofficial wildcat industrial action against BA, when to be honest BA have no influence over Gate Gourmet, especially considering that in the long term all it does is encourage BA to drop GG as primary food supplier, which of course threatens livelihoods at GG more than it does at BA.
2) Trade unions generally serve as a positive influence on the labour market, standing up for workers against unfair conditions and protecting them from being exploited. Where they go wrong is when they try to prevent positive changes which need to be made. Take for example, last years strikes at BA, which were mostly a result of BA trying to implement a new system which could accurately measure the hours worked by the check in staff. If the staff were working the hours they were contracted to do, then there would have been no problem, the only possible reason for protesting that change would have been if they were somehow cheating the previous system. In that case I believe that ‘Work shy tossers’ is a just description.
Cadbury Schweppes is only planning to sell the European drinks business that it’s had for generations (the ‘Schweppes’ bit of the company name is a clue). The recently-acquired US drinks business is the key growth driver for the entire firm.
The reason there are stuff-all Chinese companies in the FT global index is because there are stuff-all large, profitable Chinese companies. I can’t be arsed to argue with your specific points on ARM and StanChar, suffice to say they’re not in line with any arguments I’ve heard made about either by anyone sensible…
World-class companies created recently by UK management: without any research, GSK? AstraZeneca? The enlarged RBS? Now name some world-class companies created recently by the Germans, the Japs, or indeed anyone else who isn’t American…
Ed: 2) Or maybe the workers deeply resented the fact that management implied they were lying about the hours they were doing (otherwise why spend money on a system to check up on them?) and, assuming those implementing the system weren’t actually going to subject themselves to it; also resented the idea that management (who get paid far more) didn’t feel the need to spy on their own workhours and question their own honesty.
I worked for several years in the higher echelons of corporate management. I can state quite categorically that there is an equal amount of dishonesty and incompetence at all levels of the companies I was dealing with. The only real difference is that high-level incompetence and dishonesty costs a company far more than the same behaviour on a factory floor (check-in desk).
Yet companies are curiously reluctant to address this issue right up until the receivers (and a consultant like me) get called in. Therefore, I completely understand low-level opposition to systems which target bad behaviour on the factory floor but ignore it higher up.
I’m not – of course – saying that incompetence at low-level should be tolerated; merely that workers are perfectly within their rights to feel pissed off when management accuses them of it, and then react with outrage when they bristle at the accusation. I don’t know the ins-and-outs of last year’s BA dispute, but I question your labelling them as "work-shy tossers"
1) Why did the baggage handlers take unofficial wildcat industrial action against BA, when to be honest BA have no influence over Gate Gourmet, especially considering that in the long term all it does is encourage BA to drop GG as primary food supplier, which of course threatens livelihoods at GG more than it does at BA.
Um, because the middle-aged women (mainly) who work for GG are the wives, mothers, sisters etc of others who work at Heathrow, including the BA baggage handlers.
Chris: That is probably true, but it still hasn’t really helped them has it?
Jim: you’re probably right that there is an equal ammount of dishonesty occuring at higher levels, but at the time, the unions didn’t make the argument that it should have applied equally everywhere, indeed the system had already been applied to other areas of management and to aircrew. The check in staff effectively used the argument that the system was unfair because they couldn’t cheat it in the same way they could before.
Similar things have happened with the fire brigade, fair enough complain when they try to close stations, but don’t complain when they try to reform an antiquated system of working practices to make it fairer and more efficient.
In most of these cases, public sympathy for strikers dries up fairly quickly if the public cannot percieve that the strikers have been wronged, if the strikers are striking to maintain a particularly cushy state of affairs which the rest of the population don’t have access to, either an easily cheated time management system with BA, or a system which allows firefighters to have a shift pattern which is convenient for their other jobs.
Your blog really is terrible, it brings out the reactionary in me.
a system which allows firefighters to have a shift pattern which is convenient for their other jobs
Not a shift pattern, a *watch* pattern. The difference is important. Firefighters are organised into watches for a reason; in order to ensure that the same people are working together in the same groups. This is as important for firefighters as it is for any other groups of people who have to perform a complicated physical skill in unison. I never understood why the army of management consultants that infested the Fire Brigade never understood this point.
Um, because the middle-aged women (mainly) who work for GG are the wives, mothers, sisters etc of others who work at Heathrow, including the BA baggage handlers.
Some are. <A href="http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=7141>Most aren’t (and yes, I am citing Socialist Worker). On the reasons for solidarity strikes, here’s The Sun:
As crowds of workers gathered outside the community centre, many carrying placards and chanting "We want justice", they told of their shock at their sacking and gratitude for the support from BA staff.
Adiwall Sotish, 37, a driver for the company, said: "What’s happening shows unity amongst the workers because if Gate Gourmet can do this then BA or any other company can do it.
"But it’s big – I didn’t expect all this, although it’s great it’s all happened.
"We are saddened for the people who are waiting at the airport. We have to show unity."
I’m puzzled why Socialist Worker should describe references to family ties as "insidious". Of course it would be nice if workers acted from abstract principles of solidarity, but sticking up for your sister or your mother strikes me as altogether laudable. Anyway, I’ll take your word on the facts.
Ed, it was perfectly legitimate to oppose swipe card clocking-on on the basis that the workers’ pay and conditions had been negotiated in the absence of a swipe card system. Many jobs have unwritten perks and priviledges. Many of these involve flexibility over working hours. Changing these changes the nature of the work. BA might have been, in the letter of the contract, paying for work from 9 to 5. But if, in negotiation, in was accepted on both sides that they get 10 to 4, then changing the conditions of work is not cheating by the workers, but cheating by BA.
And, if you want to get all free market about things, it is the workers’ economic duty to be as efficient as possible – in other words, get the most money for the least work.
"we are a services based economy because British management are poor at investing": perhaps, but if so, why so? What is it about Britain that encourages them to assume that returns will be low so that it is wiser not to invest?
Wow, I’m truly amazed that there are so many pro and in some cases active Unionists left in the UK (not of the Paisley sort). Thatcher didn’t obviously go quite far enough….
Now I’m not opposed to trade unions on theoretical grounds but am very much opposed on practical grounds. Trade unions always go beyond being merely a check on the power of the employer to beng self serving, parasitic, organisms on large corporates whose sole purpose seems to get more money for less work for their members and more money and more power for the Union leaders.
It’s through policies such as closed shops that trade unions destroy corporate competiveness and would have condemned the UK to be an economic back water. Yay for their downfall.
However a true member serving trade union such as for prositutes and sex workers is however a valuable union and one I fully support.
PS Please don’t argue with my points you’re simply wrong and will make yourself look stupid.
Someone’s probably mentioned this above, but the reaso Britain has a disproportionate number of companies in the FT Top 100 compared to Europe or Japan is partly because more of Britain’s very large companies are quoted on stock markets than in Europe or Japan.
On salaries also I think there’s a distinction between earning £x k a year in a job you don’t expect to be doing for very long, and earning it as your full-time salary in a job you expect to be doing for a long while. Ditto with how ‘liveable’ they are. Things like children and housing make a massive difference.
"Trade unions always go beyond being merely a check on the power of the employer to beng self serving, parasitic, organisms on large corporates whose sole purpose seems to get more money for less work for their members and more money and more power for the Union leaders."
Employers always go beyond being merely providers of employment and a contributor to the national economy to being self serving, parasitic, organisms on society at large, whose sole purpose seems to be giving less money for more work from their workers and concentrating more and more capital in the hands of a tiny proportion of the population.
(y’know… while we’re generalising and all)
Matt – you’re absolutely right (we also have a disproportionate number of oilcos and financial services institutions, thanks to our colonial past and that funny place south of Old Street respectively), but I was arguing against the moron who suggested we had fewer.
Jim/Chris – I suspect you’re both right. I’m really rather uncertain on what this entails policy-wise…
Jim/Chris
However, unions are MEANT to be there as a "check on the power of the employer". If they deviate from their main purpose, this is a bad thing.
Employers (or as the rest of us call them, businesses) are MEANT to be producing widgets. They certainly can also be "providers of employment and a contributor to the national economy", but this is a pleasant sideline to widget production. This is not an evil capitalist ploy, incidentally. Spending a majority of our time and energy on getting food, as opposed to good citizenship (like "proving employment") is what we’ve been doing since before we were monkeys.
Not to argue with either of your generalizations, but just to inject a touch of the facts to the discussion.
Well while we’re doing My First Book of Capitalism, widget production grinds to a halt if untrammelled neo-liberalism leaves workers unable to fund the consumption necessary to keep the whole thing moving. And the fact that, without the labour movement, you and I wouldn’t have a vote, the NHS, a living wage, blah blah blah…
HIOP, or a little more optimistically… widget production continues only so long as the rest of us permit it to do so. And the day we wake up and realise that the widget producers are bilking us and future generations out of what’s ours in return for a life of obscene luxury is the day we rise up and burn down the widget factories!
Right on, Jim!
As somebody who was forced out of a fatcat job by illness, and now scrapes a living teaching the bright young minds of tomorrow in one of Britain’s finest post-1992 universities, widgets and most other forms of consumption are now beyond my meagre budget. And I’ve realised you don’t need ’em.
Like he says in Fight Club, "Advertising has us working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need."