“We treat our workers with respect and dignity.” These are the ironic words of Gate Gourmet’s ‘Our Values’ section on the company website. The website continues, “We communicate in an open way and promote inspiring teamwork.” The 800 workers just sacked at Heathrow, who earn about £12,000 a year, know how hollow those words are (see below).

The solidarity strike by Heathrow baggage handling workers on Friday 12 August is a fantastic example of how to fight back against the employers’ offensive. It brought operations at Heathrow to a virtual standstill. On the same day around 1000 people attended a solidarity rally in Southall, where many of the mainly Asian women workers live.

What are the facts? Gate Gourmet wants to restructure its London operations in typical neoliberal fashion because it says it is suffering ‘losses’. This involves redundancies and pay reductions, changes to sick leave and shift patterns, but most of all the threat of casualisation of the workforce. While full-time workers were under threat, the company brought in 130 temporary workers. The company wants to squeeze more profits through aan increasingly non-permanent workforce, and at the same time crush the TGWU union.

In response to a workers sit-in the company brutally summoned workers to a meeting ringed by security guards and announced their sacking through a megaphone. Some women workers allege they were shoved and harassed by the security guards. Workers on sick leave or away on holiday had sacking notices put through their doors between midnight and 6.30am.

Is Gate Gourmet really suffering losses? And anyway, who are they? Gate Gourmet is a huge international company previously owned by SAir, the holding company for Swissair. After Swissair’s bankruptcy Gate Gourmet was granted legal independence from Swissair and bought by an American company, Texas Pacific.

The axioms of the neoliberal work process – just-in-time, total quality management etc – are the stock in trade of Gate Gourmet internationally. Their web site says, “Dedication – it is not to be found in any management training manual, but it is in our employees blood (sic). Gate Gourmet people thrive on pace and on meeting tough demands (our emphasis)."

The Teamsters and Unite Here unions in the United States has just concluded difficult negotiations with Gate Gourmet over ‘givebacks’, including an attempt to remove workers’ health cover. Again the company used financial difficulties and the threat of bankruptcy to blackmail the workers. Gate Gourmet workers should demand the company opens the books, so the claims about financial difficulties can be examined. But that can only be done on an international basis. A huge transnational corporation can easily hide its profits from one country to another.

The TGWU union stressed its official opposition to the baggage handlers’ solidarity strike, as required by law. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the strike forced the company back to the negotiating table. The fight of the Gate Gourmet workforce is far from won, but it reveals in one fell swoop the effectiveness of solidarity strike action, something hardly seen in this country for 20 years.

The Gate Gourmet fight is a crucial struggle, a test of workers' abilities to stand up to the endless attempts by companies in the air transport industry to squeeze more-and-more out of their workers' for less and less.

Solidarity messages to:iqbalvaid@yahoo.co.uk

Websites: Gate Gourmet, Unite Here, TGWU, George Galloway statement