Sacked for reading a book during break
Sacked for reading a book during break
By Joe Trapido
There is a lot of abuse for contract workers in London. For example, couriers hadn't had a pay rise for 15 years, until the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain helped. (DaveBleasdale under a Creative Commons Licence)
The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) started in 2012 and we now have nearly 900 members. In four years, we have achieved a lot. We also started a sister organization, the Independent Worker Legal Services (IWLS), so we will have more impact.
We have won very good improvements in pay and conditions for some of the poorest workers in Britain eg. a higher London Living Wage (now £9.45/$12.30 per hour) for contract cleaning workers. Before, they earned £6 to £7/ hour.
Most of our members are non-English speaking cleaners and porters. They work for contract cleaning companies at well-known places eg. Senate House, the Royal College of Music and the Barbican. Many people said it was impossible to create a union for this area of work. But almost all our members in the cleaning industry now get the London Living Wage, and hundreds of them have got better sick pay, holidays and pensions from the IWGB’s ‘3cosas campaign’ (‘three things’). They got these after a long campaign with noisy protests, ending in a two-day strike by contract workers at the University of London.
We have had cycle courier firms much longer than companies like UBER or Deliveroo, but they are similar in many ways eg. that people think the people working for them are self-employed. The biggest courier companies did not give their riders a pay rise for 15 years. But after a noisy, creative IWGB campaign, two of the most important companies, City Sprint and eCourier, gave pay rises of nearly 17 and 30 per cent. So the average rider would earn the London Living Wage.
After that, couriers tried to get all the smaller courier companies to raise their pay. And they are doing this. Mach1 quickly offered a 20-per-cent rise. And Deliveroo went on strike recently.
We are proud of this but we often need to get workers’ rights in a more basic way. I have learnt from IWGB that many contract workers in Britain have no protection at work. There is a lot of abuse. Some of our members have lost their job because they are pregnant, or because a manager wanted a relative to have a job, or even for reading a book in their break. Employers often deduct money from low salaries illegally.
When we move into a workplace, this illegal behaviour stops. We have won thousands of pounds in back pay (salary they should have got, but didn’t), and got many workers their jobs back.
All this takes a lot of time and work. We get very good legal representation when we need it, but it takes many hours of work to represent new members.
So we often lose money on new members. Desperate people want to join the IWGB every day, but we cannot help most of them.
To try to help with this problem, we have set up the Independent Worker Legal Services (IWLS). This organization gives legal advice about employment to IWGB members. We hope that it will become a charity in the next few months. The trustees include a cycle courier, a cleaner and two QCs specializing in employment law. We hope to get money for the IWLS from many places eg. foundations and donations. The Trust for London have given us a grant of £30,000 ($39,000) a year for two years, but this is only enough to do the work we have now.
Please see the https://iwgb.org.uk/donate/ for more information or to help
And see September 2016 New Internationalist: Trade Unions – rebuild, renew, resist
NOW READ THE ORIGINAL: https://newint.org/blog/2016/08/17/independent-workers-union-of-great-britain/ (This article has been simplified so the words, text structure and quotes may have changed).
