You want a heartwarming Christmas advert? Here ya go:
Outsourced John Lewis cleaners have won an immediate and backdated 9% pay rise following their pledge of industrial action. The increase, backdated 5 months, takes their pay to £6.72 per hour at three central London sites, and £6.50 at one outer London site. Supervisors will now get £8.00 per hour and £7.84 respectively.
United in the IWW trade union, the cleaners notified their employer, ICM, last week of the trade dispute and impending ballot for industrial action. This ballot could have seen visible and noisy industrial action by cleaners at four John Lewis sites in London in the run up to Christmas.
John Lewis has seen pre-Christmas profits increase on last year already. The company are proud of their partnership structure, where all staff are ‘partners’ who share in the company’s profits.
But John Lewis’ cleaning contract is outsourced to MML, who outsource it again to ICM. The cleaners have seen their hours reduce and workload increase, while they were paid minimum wage of £6.19 – and they don’t share in the profits.
This increase, including a backdated lump sum just before Christmas, will make a real difference to our members’ lives. ICM further pledged to look at the potential to pay a Living Wage of £8.55 as they enter contract talks early in 2013.
I knew the wobblies were trying to reconstitute themselves by recruiting in retail sectors, but this came as a bit of a surprise. John Lewis and its contrators are obviously low hanging fruit, but the timing of the dispute is both shrewd and, hopefully, scalable. And a small victory of the disregarded and disposable in the Bitish economy is, by any measure, wonderful news. Alive as you and me.
Time to cool your heart just a little. According to an acrimonious couple of articles in recent issues of _Freedom_ (still worth the sub, IMO) the bit of the 'IWW' which has done the organising has split from the actual UK franchisees of the IWW. The usual dynamic of split ('egotist!' 'bureaucrats!' 'revisionists!' 'purists!') applies. But who cares, because 53p an hour is 53p an hour. Backdated. Get in.
Posted by: Chris williams | November 21, 2012 at 12:02 AM
huh. Those who do the organising get the franchise.
Posted by: jamie | November 21, 2012 at 12:35 AM
The local stodgy trad Dutch trade union has been very busy organising cleaners as well the past couple of years, with a long and cleverly targeted strike in 2010 (basically, they stopped cleaning the train stations) and again last eyar, winning them major concessions.
Posted by: Martin Wisse | November 21, 2012 at 07:35 AM
My earlier comment on this got eaten, possibly for the links (not v impressed with the non-Bayesian antispam filter you're rolling with. Alex would be cross).
1) the US Wobblies link to the John Lewis Wobblies and vice-versa, suggesting that the Official Wobblies are up there with the Official IRA in "people with the de facto brand rights but no face at all".
2) a link to a fun piece from Religion Dispatches on Wal-Mart and the way its coalition of people willing to work for piss-all money as long as the company hates gays and blacks is collapsing. Obvious "general implications for Republican Party" point. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6615/wal-mart_faces_a_new_round_of_historic_strikes..._but_why_now/
Posted by: john b | November 21, 2012 at 11:52 AM
"with the de re brand rights", dah. Can we have a telethon please? gbp10 from each commenter would pay to migrate the blog to a readymade hosted and fully spam protected Wordpress site without godawful captchas. Just another gbp5 each would pay for a competent developer to install a preview/edit function on comments...
Posted by: john b | November 21, 2012 at 11:55 AM
I would help fund this blog without hesitation if it were generally thought a good idea.
Posted by: Malcs | November 21, 2012 at 01:55 PM