You’ve just made your 300th flat white of the day, you’ve been on your feet for the best part of 9 hours, you’re fucking knackered and a customer has just come back and wants their almond milk ice latte remade. You are a hospitality worker in London.
Hospitality work is often badly paid and tears at your soul having to smile and say thank you to someone who likely makes 5x your wages and doesn’t leave a tip.
With growing inequality it feels especially brutal as with the gentrification of London you often have to serve the very people who are also pushing you out of your neighbourhood and bars, cafes and restaurants are part of their playground as you just try to cover your rent.
Often it feels like working in hospitality means being “invisible” with customers and managers alike not treating you with dignity or respect. It’s a shitshow and needs to change. There are around 400,000 hospitality workers in London on the books and many more off the books.
It’s a famously hard industry to organise trade unions in due to the fact that most workers only stay in jobs for short periods of time and bosses see workers as unskilled and easily replaceable.
I once was told during an organising campaign by a fellow worker that we shouldn’t aim for London Living Wage because “we don’t deserve Living Wage, it’s not like we’re nurses”. Constant belittling means confidence among workers is low and strikes and extremely rare.
Modern examples are mainly in hotels and also in an especially militant workers movement in Glasgow which has been inspirational, represented by Unite Hospitality, strikes have happened at cinemas, bars and cafes with strikes leading to pay rises in a Govan hotel and strikes ongoing in Vue Glasgow Central.
This is a good start, but we want to get things going in London!
When workers are organised and are willing to stop or walkout from work (or take more creative action) we can force bosses to hand over better wages and better conditions for all of us.
If we stay disorganised, it means staying disrespected and forever complaining to each other in kitchens, backrooms, store cupboards and walking home after your 3rd close in a week.
Beyond just improvements or concessions from bosses, we want the whole industry taken out of the hand of the rich and the owners and into our hands as workers, a world where what we make isn’t for profit and where instead of disrespect and stress, dignity and joy in the focus.
This was written by someone involved is SolFed’s hospitality organising campaign in London for a new zine, Anarchy. As part of that campaign we will be holding a workplace organiser training of the 26th of July. Find out more here.
You can find out more about the SolFed Hospitality Workers Union here.
You can find out more about Anarchy here.