EDEditors of Notes From Below

NNick Troy

OOdhran Gallagher

After a year-long organising campaign with IWW Clydeside Branch, workers at Saramago Cafe, situated within Glasgow’s Centre For Contemporary Arts (CCA), staged a walkout in March 2023 over ongoing understaffing issues. The action, which lasted less than an hour, led to three on-the-spot sackings. Over the following five weeks, workers and their supporters held daily demonstrations outside both the bar and the gallery. Despite workers’ efforts to negotiate the reinstatement of their dismissed colleagues, management remained unwilling to deal with the workers’ representatives, resulting in an embittered stalemate. Facing significant reputational damage due to their proximity to the dispute, the CCA gallery management opted to terminate their contract with Saramago Cafe in April 2023. All staff working for Saramago lost their jobs as a consequence. Subsequently, several months after the termination of the tenancy, the CCA issued a public tender for a new bar operator. Workers from Saramago submitted a bid to operate the bar as a workers’ cooperative. However, as of May 2024, the CCA has brought the management of the bar in-house.

In July 2023, workers at The 13th Note music venue and bar in Glasgow launched the first official bar workers’ strike in Scotland in over two decades. Their demands encompassed the implementation of the real living wage, fairer contracts, safe working conditions, and union recognition. Despite 95% of the workforce being represented by Unite Hospitality, the employer refused to acknowledge the union throughout the dispute. Workers began striking in early July, and communicated their intention to strike every weekend until August 6th. By the second weekend of strikes, The 13th Note’s manager abruptly liquidated the business, two hours before a scheduled ACAS meeting with the employees’ representatives, resulting in the immediate sacking of all staff. The following week a statement written by the former owner appeared in the windows of the vacant venue unjustly blaming the union for the closure of the 21 year old venue. In April 2024, after a lengthy legal proceeding, the sacked workers won an employment tribunal over the employer’s failure to consult over the dismissals. The tribunal awarded the workers compensation equivalent to 90 days’ salary. Since the closure, workers have set up a crowdfunder to support their bid to reopen the venue as a worker-run cooperative. To date, City Property, Glasgow’s City Council’s property arm, has yet to grant the workers the lease to reopen the venue, despite mounting public pressure.

EDWhat were the main problems at your workplace before the strike and how were they addressed?

NThe key issues that we organised around in The 13th Note were poverty pay, the absence of contracts or the use of zero hours contracts and major health and safety issues. We had a recording studio that was underneath some of the booths that had been overtaken by black mould. The studio had to be abandoned with all the equipment in it, like something out of The Last of Us.

We had a gender pay gap and general management mistreatment. We had a mouse infestation. The venue had issues with water leaking onto faulty equipment causing them to combust. We had workers who couldn’t go to the toilet because there was no one to cover them when they left the equipment. There was a stage floor on top of the actual floor that was sinking in, and it could have easily ended up with fridges falling on people’s heads. The bar had no security, and no provisions for worker safety. The 13th Note is in a dodgy part of town and so it’s generally unsafe for staff getting home at night by themselves. We also had attempted break-ins, and workers had been threatened. I had to go to court over an issue. I was attacked by the disgruntled ex of one of the bar staff. Conditions were just steadily getting worse and worse. And we had some members of staff on as little as £6.83 an hour.

It was a fucking shambles.These issues were generally not addressed until we launched the collective grievance and got the union involved and there was public pressure. The owner and the management simply ignored the issues, and kicked it into the long grass.

OThe key issue at Saramago was understaffing. At that point this had gotten to levels that were seriously unsafe. There had clearly been an attempt by management to cut staffing numbers to save money for themselves, but also as a push back against our union because at that point we’d gone on strike. They had figured out who was in the union and were trying to intimidate, threaten and manipulate people in work.

We had been organising solidly for close to a year and had taken a number of direct actions preceding the strike. We had done several ‘marches on the boss’, and had won a pay increase and taxi cover.

EDOne of the unique aspects of bar work is the kind of socialising that it enables in the workplace. What happened to your relationships with co-workers in the process of carrying out organisational work?

OIt’s an interesting question. And it’s a complex one. Before we started organising, I was friends with a lot of the people I worked with. As we got into organising, and as it got really intense towards the end, and went very public, some of the friendships became much closer.

I have a bond with people who I’m still quite close friends with, even if we don’t see each other very often, through that experience. At the same time, there were people I was friends with, but that didn’t translate into them overcoming their fear and being motivated to be part of the struggle. And there are people who I was friends with who actually took the side of management and who are no longer my friends because I’m not gonna be friends with a scab.

It is common in hospitality for the manager to be friends with the workers. This was the case in Saramago. This socialising dynamic in the workplace can also be used in a very anti-union way - as a manipulative tool for the bosses. It’s important to recognise that solidarity relationships for union organising are not just friendships, they are not the same as friendships. Just because someone’s been your friend doesn’t mean they’ll sign that grievance letter or come to the march on the boss, or do something when your pal gets fired because they’re in a union. So it can work both ways.

There’s this classic anti-union narrative: if you try to unionise, you’re gonna create divisions in the workplace. You’re gonna ruin this nice socialising dynamic we have where we’re all friends. This totally ignores the other things that are happening and the horrendous conditions people are working under. That socialising dynamic can be used in an anti-union way as well, in that it tries to suppress these conflicts.

NI’d agree. The socialising aspect can work in different ways. In The Note we had 100% union density. So it wasn’t necessarily an issue for us. But we did have a couple of guys that were elevated to management during the dispute because they didn’t join the union. There’s one of them in particular who I really got on well with and he hated the management and the owner. I don’t know what his issue was, but he scabbed. He once came out of the kitchen and physically threatened me to try to get us to back down. People that had been your best pals a month before were now under the thumb of the owner.

They almost use the fact that we’re all friends to spit poison at us. It’s bizarre and frankly immature. I used to work at another bar, and we unionised over issues during Covid. When the 3am licence was cut back to a 10pm licence, I went from working 40 hours to working 5 hours and we unionised around that issue. I was friendly with the family that owned the bar, and they were happy for me to be the rep. They even paid for me to go to rep training. But the week I was away doing the training, they spread rumours about me, some of the most unbelievable stuff. And they destroyed friendships which never recovered.

Even people that you think are really good people, and you think are going to get on board or at least hear you out, can be some of the most awful people. It’s an ideologically confused industry because they all like to think of themselves as lefties and whatnot. I went to a meeting where I was intimidated and threatened, and on the wall in the management office there was a picture of Jeremy Corbyn. It was insane. I felt like I was going fucking mental.

OI agree with that. Our bar was literally named after Saramago, the Portuguese Communist writer, so you know…

EDHow were the strikes in your workplaces organised? What challenges did you face and how did you reach the point of taking action?

NEverything was done by the book. We had to escalate over months, and make sure we jumped through every hoop until we got to the point we could ballot for strike action. So it was a slow process, and that was a challenge because you do get people leaving. But at the same time, it allowed us to develop public pressure. Initially we launched a collective grievance. We let the management know that if they didn’t respond within 24 hours we would go to the press. They didn’t respond. We went to the press, and it blew up.

Then management got around the table. We gained a couple of small concessions that were never really enacted. We escalated with sit-down occupations. The support for that was incredible. That was one of my best days working. I was just standing on the bar watching people rush in and disrupt everything. We forced them back round the table again. We also invoked Section 44 Employment Act: the ability to leave on full pay if the venue didn’t meet health and safety compliance. All the while we were getting consistent news coverage. Our key leverage was public opinion and public support.

OWe didn’t go through legalistic routes with our action - it was a wildcat strike. Our walkout lasted less than an hour. But it took place on a Friday evening, so it went from maybe 200 people in the bar, over two floors, to the place being cleared because people weren’t being served for about 45 minutes. That was really incredible. During the strike, we had a petition that went round to customers to get public support for our strike action. We got around 50 signatures from people. The punters were really enthusiastic and on-board with what we were doing.

The reason we were able to organise this action, and people were up for doing it, was because of the relationships we had built up over the course of the previous year, and the other actions we’d taken. We’d already done 3 marches on the boss where we’d written a collective letter ourselves, and got a super majority of people to sign it, and then delivered it in-person to the boss as a group of 5 or 6 of us. What might sound quite small or mild, was really central to raising the confidence of the workers. The dynamics between the workers and the bosses became clearer by taking those actions. Everyone’s perspective really changed after delivering our letter in-person. Because there’s this feeling of empowerment that you so rarely have when you’re working in a job like this. You’re disempowered all of the time - you’re told when you can eat, when you can sit down, and when you can go to the toilet.

EDIn the hospitality sector, workers can often be disinterested in the work that they’re doing. How did you get people to identify with the struggle and stick it out? And where was the leverage in your action?

OMobilising workers comes back to individual relationships. In my experience, these are built through one-to-one conversations with your coworkers, ideally outside of work. When we started organising in Saramago, the very first thing we did was sit down and set up a spreadsheet to map the workplace and map relationships in the workplace. How many workers did we have? How many did we need to talk to? Who was more or less likely to support a union?

As you’re bringing people in, you’re building the confidence of those people, and thereby strengthening those relationships. We had an increasing escalation of asks of coworkers. Will you sign this letter? Will you start paying dues and be a signed up member? Will you talk to this person about joining the union?
On the night that the first 4 people were fired, I was working this shift. There were another 3 workers from the union who weren’t yet fired, but knew they were going to be. They walked off their shift when they saw the first people being fired. I really think that this is testament to the strength of the relationships that had been built and the strength of this small but strong union we built.

During the whole course of the dispute, and when we were getting really big crowds, day after day, week after week, to these pickets, and people were boycotting the bar, it was still clear that we had much more leverage as workers inside this workplace, than we did with any amount of public support. Press leverage just doesn’t compare at all. It’s a much greater threat to the bosses if we withdraw our labour, whether that’s by going on strike for a day, or for 40 minutes, or even working slower. That’s the real leverage and the real threat to bosses. Somewhere at the back of the boss’s mind they’re thinking ‘this is not disrupting my income now, but if they’re getting together like this, and they’re willing to stand up to me like this, what else might they be willing to do?’

NSometimes in hospitality people have low self-worth because there’s a general perception that workers are easily replaceable. Sometimes that’s true. But the hospitality sector has massive labour shortages. At the moment they are really struggling to get people in the door, and when they get people in the door, it’s hard to keep them. So I think we were able to understand that strength.

We were also able to understand our actual role in the workplace. Like, when you try to break down Marx’s labour theory value in relation to pouring a pint, when you put things as crudely as that, people think ‘oh yeah, wait a minute’. It gets people’s back up to think of the added value they are generating without seeing any of it. So we understood that the workplace only runs because of us. It wasn’t because the boss had some great idea to open this pub, or because the management ran it well. It was purely because we turned up every day and did that work.

In terms of overcoming general feelings of indifference, I did a walk around for Living Rent when we were organising in the bar. The person I did it with was talking about how she gets people on the doorstep to join the tenants union. She said, you just need to polarise - find something that someone is complaining about and link it back to the rent. So I just started doing that with work. And we all started doing it. Nobody on the bar or in the kitchen, or in the venue could moan about being skint, or struggling to pay their rent without it being brought back to work - well this is all because you’re getting paid less, that’s because you have half as many hours this week than you did last week. And it just gets people’s backs up.

There’s an ideology in hospitality that prevents people from linking their living conditions to the problems they face at work - at least not in any conscious way. If you’re finishing at one in the morning, you’re either going to the pub to get pissed, or you’re going up the road to go to sleep. It’s easier to just get home and forget about it. Sometimes you just have to be a nuisance and make people realise they shouldn’t be thinking ‘that’s that’ and head home. You need to make them aware that this isn’t something that they have to put up with. These problems are linked to the work that you do every day and the fact that you aren’t paid enough to do it. Then, when you combine that with an understanding of how you produce value in the workplace, it’s a concrete analysis. No matter how intimidated they might be, they then have this niggling in the back of their brain. And that’s what we found useful for overcoming indifference.

When Saramago went on strike, that was also really important for us too because it demonstrated that you can be a hospitality worker and refuse to take shit. We gained 3 or 4 new members the week that all happened. It really built our confidence witnessing it. Our boss was shitting himself because we had the collective grievance out at the same time. My boss actually came up to me and said, ‘Oh, it’s terrible what’s happened up at Saramago, the way those owners have behaved’. And I’m thinking: you’re doing all the same fucking things here. But he was also shitting himself. And that’s something that happens around the city when these things occur, it gives workers a confidence boost.

EDWhat does the closing down of the businesses in both struggles indicate about the sector and class struggle within it? What lessons have you learned from these experiences, and how do people interpret the outcome of these struggles?

OThe resolution for us was mixed because none of us got our jobs back. And, obviously, our aim wasn’t to lose our jobs. But we’re satisfied inasmuch as we stopped this business getting away with such blatant union busting. The owners who were running Saramago also run another bar in Glasgow, The Doublet. From their perspective, if they had given into our demands, that would have solidified the power of the union in Saramago, and we’d have been in a really strong position to bargain and negotiate. And this would have had a knock-on effect on what the workers at The Doublet would expect.

We underestimated the level of aggression that the bosses would respond with. We weren’t naive going into our strike, we discussed the scenario of someone getting fired. But we only really expected that they would target one or two people who they perceived as key organisers. We didn’t think they would be reckless enough to fire the majority of their staff. In the end, with all of us removed, they didn’t have enough staff to run the bar. But I don’t regret the actions we took. You have to attempt these actions to help build a stronger union culture in this country.

After the CCA dropped Saramago, they put out the management of it to a public tender. A group of the former workers put together a bid and raised funding to run the bar as a co-op. We had a fully costed business plan which the CCA ultimately chose not to go with. They chose to go with a private business again instead. So that felt like a real missed opportunity on the CCA’s part. But it was worth a go for us to try to set up a cooperatively run hospitality venue in Glasgow. Unfortunately it didn’t come to fruition and the 13th Note had similar plans.

NThe resolutions demonstrate how lawless the sector is. We just recently won our tribunal against The 13th Note for unlawful dismissal and we got the maximum reward for that. But it doesn’t really account for the fact that since July loads of us have been out of work. I couldn’t get a job until very recently. So it speaks to how precarious the sector is, that something like this can just happen. In traditionally unionised sectors, the employer would have to go through the proper legal procedure. They wouldn’t be able to just axe staff and receive virtually no punishment for it. It also speaks to how worried the bosses are about unionising in our sector. There was definitely pressure on her from other similarly sized businesses all over Glasgow not to give in, in case there was copy cat stuff.

So as much as it looks like a defeat at this moment in time, I don’t think either of our disputes have ultimately ended. I think they’re part of what is effectively a young movement that’s maturing, and these mistakes have to be made so that we understand what to do the next time, so that the people who come after can understand what to do for themselves.

EDDo you think your struggles in hospitality highlight a fundamental contradiction between profit-driven hospitality and workers’ rights? Can worker emancipation in hospitality only be achieved by abolishing venues structured around profit imperatives? Are workers’ co-ops the answer and can they exist in a capitalist market? How do worker organising efforts in hospitality impact the broader workers’ movement?

OWe are very confident that a workers’ co-op would survive and thrive. There’s no doubt about that. Clearly not all businesses survive in this landscape, the fact that it’s a workers’ co-op does not mean it’s less likely to survive. This is obviously part of capitalist propaganda, that it’s somehow the genius or graft of the boss that makes the business work or not, which is not the case. The boss is not the one pouring the pints, the one serving people, the one who is on the ground in the workplace, and they don’t have this knowledge or experience of what is working and what isn’t.

The prospect of workers’ co-ops and a network of hospitality co-ops is the horizon. It’s not an immediate prospect, but it has to start somewhere. The more co-ops that exist, the more they can cooperate amongst themselves and support each other and make it more feasible for co-ops in general to survive. And this would show that we don’t need bosses at all.

In terms of the outlook for workers organising in hospitality, as Nick was saying, militant hospitality organising is very new and young. So we’re just at a point where we have to try to build these units and develop our abilities and our solidarity relationships in and between workplaces, and encourage workers to take direct action and solve the issues in the workplace.

Relying on legalistic routes or on reps or paid organisers, benefit us in the short term but ultimately this is not the route to a strong militant workers movement. There are huge numbers of workers in hospitality, so if there are strong unions there, there are more strong unions. And this can help normalise more militant methods of organising in other sectors. There are tactics and strategies of organising that are not recognised by the mainstream trade union movements in a lot of ways. Direct action and worker democracy are missing from the trade union movement, at least in recent history.

NUnder their existing form, bars like Saramago and The 13th Note were able to foster a community of different tightnit cultural and political groups. They often went beyond just being transactional. I think the natural progression for these places, even economically speaking, is towards being co-ops. It is unsustainable to just extract from hospitality businesses, because their profit margins are so slim, and the reality is that you do need to reinvest in the business. A workers’ co-op would reinvest seasonally. We’d be taking the profit from December and reinvesting it to ensure it was a sustainable project in January, February, March. Whereas with profit motivated small businesses, the returns are just taken, ‘thank you very much’. That profit from December goes toward our boss’s half a million pound house in Hillhead. It’s probably one of the most prominent examples of how unsustainable the capitalist mode of production is.

If we are successful, we can also support other bars and restaurants to do the same. The hurdle is actually getting the first one up and running off the back of a struggle, and then making it work. This would then create a situation that when we’re organising other workplaces, the option for the boss is either you give the workers what they want, or you’re forced to close down and the workers will take it over. It would be good to have that as a stick, a double stick, and one stick has nails in it. It’d be good to have that as a bargaining chip.

In terms of the general outlook for organising hospitality and its contribution to the broader workers movement, I actually think hospitality has a leading role to play in trade unionism in this country. But the trade union movement really needs to wake up to the fact that hospitality isn’t going away. The situation we’re in is all down to the rise of the multipolar world, the decline of Britain as an imperial power, and the loss of these colonial ties and the depletion and outsourcing of our industrial base and the shift to a more service based economy. So the unions need to respond to this new reality.

We all love this idea of workers in some industrial sector. But the reality is, it’s just not happening like that anymore. The economy is shifting dramatically. If we want to continue as a movement, the future of our movement depends on us, adapting and shifting. We haven’t been dynamic enough since the miner’s strikes. Really, what we have to be doing is pouring more resources towards hospitality workers and organising hospitality work. Not simply to come to some weak agreement with the bosses or whatever, but to actually have a militant trade union movement that is constantly advancing our interests.

I’m no economist, right, but I feel like everyone’s deluding themselves with the way the British economy is going. This idea that there’ll be a downturn and then we’ll get back up on our feet in a little while. This has been trundling on for ages. So the reality is, we need to be ready to go on the offensive and develop as a political movement, and part of that has to be organising the most precarious and lowest paid.