Hi everyone! This is @brightonsolfed taking over @nevillesouthall’s account for the next two hours. We’ll be talking about: problems with wage theft in the hospitality industry and how we fight it, our Housing Union and the dire state of the housing market...
...how we function as a revolutionary union and why we feel the need to organise this way, and how you can get involved in Solidarity Federation @solfed_iwa
[CN: transphobia]
Before we start, we’d like to express our solidarity to our trans comrades in London and across the world who have come under disgusting attack at Pride today. For more information see this thread:
Before we start, we’d like to express our solidarity to our trans comrades in London and across the world who have come under disgusting attack at Pride today. For more information see this thread:
[CN: transphobia]
And this one:
And this one:
If you want to support trans people, take part in the consultation around changes to the Gender Recognition Act. More info on how you can help with that is in this thread:
You can also make a donation to a fund for a trans student fighting victimisation at University of Bristol: crowdjustice.com/case/trans-stu…
Reminder that this is @brightonsolfed taking over @nevillesouthall’s Twitter account from 7pm-9pm this evening, talking about our activities as a union and the tactics we use to stand up for ourselves in our workplaces and living situations! 💪🏻
Beginning with our Hospitality campaign. Five years ago, @BrightonSolFed members working in Brighton's restaurants, cafes, pubs, hotels wanted to improve their casualised working conditions. But casualisation itself made it hard to organise within those workplaces
Casualisation is the process of replacing safe and full-time jobs with short-term and part-time positions, giving employers more flexibility. For example zero hour contracts in which your boss calls you up in the morning to tell you if you got work that day
That's great for bosses. The trouble is we have all got to pay rent, bills and buy food - but we don't get to call up the landlord and tell them whether or not we will pay rent. Casualisation makes workers more vulnerable and easier to exploit
One of the ways that casualised hospitality workers are exploited is through wage theft. Wage theft is a huge issue. It’s estimated at over £3 billion a year in the UK, affecting over 2 million workers, according to a study by researchers at Middlesex university (Unpaid Britain)
For comparison, that’s 10 times more than the total cost of shoplifting - £335m (British Retail Consortium 2013-14). Yet for shoplifting, shop owners can call the police, but if bosses engage in wage theft, the police will do nothing & it’s difficult for workers 2 get their money
A lot of workers think the law protects them, and we are sometimes asked why we don't go to ACAS or an employment tribunal. Here's what union Edapt suggest *before* going to a tribunal: 
Here's what we do - notice the difference?
With our methods, the worker is in charge - no waiting, no relying on some professional or authority to get going, no behind-closed-doors stuff. And most of the time, our direct action solidarity gets the goods! 💪🏻
ACAS/Employment Tribunal is often not a practical solution for casualised workers who haven't been paid. Many are not in a position to understand their basic rights very well, let alone the complicated bureaucratic procedures to enforce them - it's easy to miss the deadlines 📝
A worker who wants to take their grievance to an employment tribunal must first start conciliation with ACAS, which takes about 6 weeks. But ACAS conciliation is entirely voluntary for the boss, who is also entirely safe to ignore the outcome 👎🏻
The delay until the employment tribunal hearing can be quite long - half a year is not uncommon. Thus an employer who routinely violates the most basic rights is able to drag it out for months, make the worker jump through all kinds of hoops 🙁
The law is designed to have lots of hurdles, delays & frustration for a worker who hasn't been paid. Try explaining to your landlord or gas company that you will pay your rent or gas bill a couple of months late because your boss wants you to go thru ACAS before he pays you! 💰
Our experience of organising in hospitality is that mainstream unions have mostly retreated from casualised workplaces, because it's hard work, and they want a stable subs-income to fund their bureaucracies
Often these unions don't do much more than telling workers to vote for the ‘right’ political parties to get rid of casualisation
Reminder that this is @BrightonSolFed taking over @NevilleSouthall’s Twitter account until 9pm this evening! 🦄
We launched our Brighton Hospitality Workers campaign in October 2013. The aim: fight for better working conditions in the sector mostly through public disputes relying on solidarity. Often we defend a worker who has been mistreated and demand that this be rectified
Our first public dispute was in March 2014 in support of two hotel cleaners who were owed a total of £466. These were outsourced jobs - cleaners working through a multinational agency 🏫
The hotel claimed it wasn’t their problem because the cleaners were outsourced. The cleaning agency claimed it wasn’t their problem because their contract with the hotel had changed from a different agency 😬
So we called a protest outside the hotel, with leaflets informing guests about the situation. 30 minutes later the hotel promised they'd get paid! 🙌🏻🙌🏽🙌🏿
Full payment was made the following week, and in a statement the employer said that they were paying as 'a gesture of goodwill'. It's amazing how much goodwill a half-hour picket can inspire! 😅
Since then we have won over 30 disputes, getting workers back many tens of thousands of pounds. We are neither professionals nor a charity, just workers who want to help other workers, and who expect to be helped by other workers 💪🏻💪🏽💪🏿
Our longest dispute was against a cafe - we picketed them almost every Saturday for over 4 months, until they paid the worker. We didn't get all the money owed but we showed we don't give up: brightonsolfed.org.uk/brighton/caffe…
Our shortest dispute was a pizza place who didn’t want to pay a worker for a trial shift - but less than 24 hours after we asked they pay the worker, they did - £37.50 💷
Our biggest payout was for a worker who had spent nearly a decade doing 60+ hour weeks below minimum wage and without paid holidays. The business agreed to pay £23,000 - which was still far short of the amount by which they had underpaid the worker 📊
Our biggest picket was on 1st May last year when 200 protested outside a restaurant, demanding they pay a worker owed over £2000 in holiday pay and minimum wages: brightonsolfed.org.uk/brighton/smile…
We've had a go at establishing solid groups inside workplaces - but it's hard for us too, with the instability of the sector, the atmosphere of resignation, the personal circumstances of the workers (migrants, young people, part-time students)
While many of our disputes are still about helping individual workers from outside the workplace, increasingly we find that our organising is making it easier for all casualised workers to fight back ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿
We just won a dispute with a business who we had disputes with twice before. This time it was easy - they gave up as soon as soon as we sent them a letter ✉️
Both workers & bosses have heard about us, & that makes it easier to fight back - often without us having to do anything...
... Every so often, workers email us to say they had a problem getting paid, told their boss "Pay me now or I'll go to SolFed!", and then the boss pays up pretty quickly. This always makes us really happy! 😀
This is only possible possible because we're happy to help all workers. In our experience in hospitality, mainstream unions only help their existing members, who get support in return for paying subs - it's a service
What we offer fellow workers is not a service but our solidarity. We want to change the balance of power between bosses and workers - through public disputes based on working class solidarity 🦄🌈
Mainstream unions struggle to break through in hospitality, & politicians make broken promises to get rid of 0-hour contracts...
... We think our approach is much more realistic: we're getting workers money back now, and at the same time we’re fighting casualisation and empowering workers through building our union and contributing to a general culture where people stand up for one another 💕
Reminder than this is @brightonsolfed tweeting as Nev for this evening - now until 10pm! We are not SWARM despite the username, but we love @sexworkhive very much! Please direct specific replies and DMs to us @brightonsolfed and we'll try reply - we won't see any DMs sent to Nev
[CN sexism & sexual harassment]
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Something we come across a lot in our disputes is sexism and sexual harassment. In hospitality, there are all kinds of dodgy expectations of women and those perceived as women
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Something we come across a lot in our disputes is sexism and sexual harassment. In hospitality, there are all kinds of dodgy expectations of women and those perceived as women
For example, in a cafe we had a dispute with, the owner was only interested in women who applied for the job. Then he invited some of his mates to the interview and they rated applicants out of 10 for attractiveness 😠
When workers complained, they got sacked - leading to more interviews. In another place, the managers had a habit of dating women in casualised jobs - and sacked one after she was not interested in going on a second date 😡
Sexism is a constant presence in many workplaces where it can take many forms. From lower pay, to expectations of unpaid work, to sexual harassment by bosses, other workers or customers, sexism means women and workers seen as women are treated unequally
We just published a guide to fighting sexism in the workplace, called the Stuff Your Sexist Boss (doesn't want you to know). It describes direct, collective strategies that build and maintain a culture of resistance in the workplace
While it’s not always possible to directly confront sexism at work, there is still much that can be done to make work more bearable and to undermine sexist behaviour
Coping strategies can allow workers to deal with things on a personal level, while tactics of resistance can help you to actively fight against unequal treatment, objectification, harassment and structural disadvantage
In this way workers can organise and fightback, building a culture of solidarity and support at work, which ultimately means ourselves and others experiencing sexism are less isolated and more likely to win
The 24 page pamphlet is available from SolFed groups for free, as well as on our website: brightonsolfed.org.uk/sysb
Contact solfedpublicitycommission@gmail.com if you want copies for your group.
The illustration was drawn for us by our comrade Bahar Mustafa 👌🏻👌🏽👌🏿
Contact solfedpublicitycommission@gmail.com if you want copies for your group.
The illustration was drawn for us by our comrade Bahar Mustafa 👌🏻👌🏽👌🏿
Something else we come across a lot is racism and xenophobia. Sometimes bosses divide workers along ethnic lines or by language. A lot of bosses use the fact that migrant workers are often more vulnerable - in the worst cases they ruthlessly exploit undocumented workers
Most migrant workers are less aware of their rights, or don't know where to get support - though the same is often true for young UK workers
Sadly a lot of politicians are trying to divide workers further, by peddling the idea that migrant workers are undermining pay and conditions - shamefully that includes politicians claiming to represent the working class
Labour market studies show that migration has little impact on wages, and in reality it's the same Tory/Libdem/Labour policies like casualisation which are the actual cause, undermining workers and strengthening bosses
As our comrades in the wobblies @The_IWW say on a great sticker of theirs: it's not immigrants who are pushing down wages - it's your boss ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿
If we want to improve our conditions, we need to reject the racist lies of politicians, and unite as workers irrespective of nationality, status or ethnicity - and fight for better conditions for all of us
Reminder that this is @BrightonSolFed taking over Nev’s account until 10pm this evening! 🤙
Since June 2017, we have also been organising in housing. As most people will know, soaring rents, deductions to our deposits, poor quality accommodation, accommodation not suited to our needs, rip off agency fees, and insecure tenancies are all common - the list goes on
Given the power that landlords and estate agents hold over our lives, fighting back can seem daunting. Agencies can refuse to rent a place & keep our money...
...landlords can refuse repairs and evict us; landlords can price us out of our homes - all with minimal legal protection that takes specialist knowledge to understand
We decided to start with something that causes us real problems when moving: deductions to our deposits. Much like wages, theft of tenancy deposits is big business - estimated to cost tenants over £1 billion per year (mirror.co.uk/money/get-depo…)
Also much like wages, the protections for tenants that do exist often involve a drawn out process that can take months, when you really need the money back 👎🏻👎🏽👎🏿
Whilst we’re all in favour of tenants getting their deposits back, in our experience, there are major issues with the dispute resolution services provided by deposit protection schemes, which are supposed to mediate proposed deductions to a tenant’s deposit
Firstly, dispute resolution keeps the problem private, allowing agencies and landlords to hide the fact that they are attempting to take money from tenants who have already given them significant portions of their income
Secondly, dispute resolution is inherently stacked in the favour of landlords and estate agents, since they tend to have more time, money, and specialist knowledge than tenants to put towards disputes ✍️
Third, tenants can only go through dispute resolution within 3 months of the end of their tenancy, which is not always possible for various reasons. Fourth, dispute resolution relies on us keeping evidence of issues in our homes that it is not always realistic for us to have
Finally, not everyone’s landlord protects their deposit, meaning that they don’t have recourse to the dispute resolution service, and would have to pursue an incredibly drawn out legal process to try and get their deposit back instead
Instead of the dispute resolution service, we have been taking on deposit deductions using direct action 🦄
Since we started doing this, we have organised with a number of tenants to help them successfully demand the return of their deposit. In August 2017, we worked with a group of tenants to organise a successful dispute for the return of their £2400 deposit 💷💷💷
These tenants also successfully demanded the return of just over 10% of their rent - £3900 - for having to live in accommodation that was damp and bug infested 🐜🐜🐜
The landlord and agency initially threatened legal action - we made it public that they were trying to bully the tenants via the threat of legal action and they paid not long after 😅
Including this dispute, our campaign against deposit theft has won back in the region of £10,000, via direct action campaigns of tenants supporting other tenants
We have also supported tenants to demand repairs - one tenant was able to get a new cooker after a year of asking when we sent a letter to his landlord threatening a direct action campaign 🍽
Another person contacted us recently to tell us that an agency were attempting to take a significant amount of money from the deposit of his mum, who is a pensioner, which was making moving for her very difficult...
...The person challenged the agency to remove the deductions and they refused. He then threatened to them that he would contact us. He received an email shortly after confirming that the deposit would be returned in full, and apologising for any inconvenience 😻
Our longest running dispute is in support of a tenant who was served an eviction notice after asking for repairs to his seriously dilapidated flat - which had seen three ceilings collapse and his bedroom become uninhabitable...
...the landlord recently lost the eviction proceeding in court, and many people in the city are now aware of the way landlords and agencies regularly treat tenants who ask for repairs. Importantly, they also know they can fight back. The case is ongoing: vimeo.com/276276202
...and you can follow our account for updates @BrightonSolFed
Whilst we think it’s really important that tenants get their money back, we also want tenants to feel supported to have control over their lives in what is often a difficult situation. As one tenant who recently successfully fought a deposit theft dispute puts it:
[CN suicide]
I was going nuts last summer (anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts) during the whole eviction process that dragged on from April to October and left me homeless for 3 months...
I was going nuts last summer (anxiety, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts) during the whole eviction process that dragged on from April to October and left me homeless for 3 months...
... SolFed stood up for me and supported me in sticking it out until the agents finally gave in and paid up what they owed...
... My whole understanding not just of the extortion and bullying tactics of landlords and estate agents but of the social structures that prop them up went through a kind of explosion of experience...
... If it wasn't for SolFed & the incredible friends who told me about them & gave me space to stay on their sofas, in their tents, gardens and homes, I would have been on the streets. Direct action is the only thing that can change the crappy way things have been for too long...
... SolFed have shown me that the way to do successful direct action is with friends – and dignity, perseverance, imagination and a fall-over laughing sense of humour...
... I'm happy to say that it was the whole of the campaign with SolFed that not only resolved the issue, but also kept me going through a traumatic time in my life.
Reminder that this is @BrightonSolFed taking over Nev’s account until 10pm! Thanks for being with us so far 🤳
Hopefully we’ve shown this evening why we use the tactics we do. The beauty of direct action solidarity is that it empowers ordinary people to take control of our lives. This means that anyone can do what we’re doing!
For us, solidarity is about ordinary people sticking together and fighting for the things we need. While it’s good for ordinary people when pay and conditions improve, when housing becomes cheaper and better, and when benefits go up, our bosses, landlords and politicians hate it
Those who own businesses, make money from rent, manage public services and ‘run the economy’ have very different interests to us. Instead we need to stand up and fight for the things we need.
They want us to work more for less, but we want the opposite. So where there are different class interests, there can only be class struggle.
Bosses, landlord, politicians try to divide us by giving privileges to some at the expense of others. We’re neither grateful for the few breadcrumbs the bosses throw us occasionally, nor are we envious if they fall to others
It is easy to see how we are divided:temps/permanent workers, citizens/migrants, men/women...plus all other kinds of bigotry used to divide and weaken all of us. We stand together with those who are oppressed because we recognise that we can only be free when everyone is.
This bond of universal working class solidarity provides the basis for everything we do.
As workers, we can’t rely on representatives to sort out our problems, whether they are ‘political‘ representatives in parliament or ‘economic’ representatives in the trade unions. Nor can we rely on the laws which are made by the rich to serve the rich.
Our best defence is not fighting in the courts, but taking collective action. Our strength comes from our ability to disrupt ‘business as usual’ through direct action such as strikes, occupations, boycotts...
We call this kind of action, which bypasses representatives and empowers us to directly achieve our goals, direct action.
Are you, or someone you know, having problems with an agency not returning your deposit ? Instead of going to the dispute resolution service or court and waiting for ages, you could get a few friends together, demand the agency pay up, protest outside if necessary
Is your boss not paying you what you’re owed ? Instead of going to ACAS whose decision your boss can safely ignore, you could picket the workplace and tell customers what’s happening - in our experience bosses don’t like that!
As tenants and workers, we don’t always need to rely on lawyers or union bureaucrats - we can fight for ourselves and win. If you want some advice, we’re happy to help you get organised!
SolFed isn’t confined to Brighton - we have members throughout the UK. The most active SolFed groups are in Manchester (@McrSolFed), Liverpool (@liverpoolsolfed), Bristol (@bristolsolfed) and London @slsolfed @nlsolfed
We also have members elsewhere and it doesn’t take many people to get a group going - contact us through our website if you’re keen solfed.org.uk/contact
Being in a larger organisation means access to more resources - publicity, advice, and not least solidarity action throughout the UK
You can contact Brighton SolFed:
On here 🤳
Email: brighton@solfed.org.uk ✉️
Text: 07427239960 📱
On here 🤳
Email: brighton@solfed.org.uk ✉️
Text: 07427239960 📱
That’s it from us - remember to follow us @brightonsolfed & @solfed_iwa if you want to stay in touch with what we’re up to!
Finally, we want to say a huge, giant thank you to Nev. He is an absolute legend, who has put himself on the line defending the most vulnerable, when he easily could have kept his head down. Let’s all tell him how much we love and appreciate his solidarity
Good night! 💕🦄💪🌈
