An Account Of The JJ Fast Food Worker's Strike Tottenham 1995-6
RPM 6
When workers take strike action, things start to change. It is a time when people very quickly start to organise, communicate and think in a different and more positive way and when solidarity becomes more than just a slogan. Although perhaps not always the most effective form of industrial action against your boss, going on strike does immediately make it much clearer what and who workers are up against when they make a serious attempt at improving things at work. In however small ways, you start to feel strength and value each other in not only fighting an unequal and alienating system but also seeing and creating a society that workers will eventually run ourselves. And in contrast, workers see the worst excesses of the profit-led system that we are struggling against.
The workers at JJ Fast Foods workers were sacked on October 1995 for organising against low pay and atrocious working conditions. Their activities in the Dispute, and the support for them that was generated in the local community and beyond is an example of grassroots working class self-organisation at its best. It showed the vital part that immigrant communities can play in these struggles, effectively cutting across the racism and false divisions that are deliberately and increasingly encouraged and inflamed by Politicians, Capitalists, the Media and the Far Right.
This pamphlet looks at the problems the JJ workers faced: of working within the current union structures, of police and State harassment, the bureaucracy of industrial tribunals and the participation of the organised left. It also attempts to draw some positive lessons as to how workers can improve things for the better through direct action and working class organisation.
John McArthur Member of the JJ Fast Food Workers Support Group 1995-96 April 2000
Shortly after 5.30am on 31st October 1995 in a warehouse on an industrial estate in Tottenham, North London, forty-five mainly Kurdish and Turkish workers who had joined a union at JJ Fast Food Distribution Company were refusing to work. They were protesting at the victimisation and sacking of their elected shop steward (workplace union rep) the day before.
The response of their Boss, Mustafa Kamil, flanked by his security guards, was to separate them from the other workers and force them out of the warehouse. As they gathered outside, they had to defend themselves against members of a right-wing Turkish Nationalist group who attacked them with sticks, bricks, bottles, crowbars and billiard balls in bags.
Twenty minutes later units from the Metropolitan Police's paramilitary Territorial Support Group arrived and attacked them with batons, hospitalising four workers and injuring many others. Over the next four months the JJ dispute became possibly the most important dispute in North/East London in the last years of the 20th Century. The 45 workers undertook a solid and disciplined unofficial strike for over 4 months in the face of police and scab violence, intimidation and hardship. On top of this, they had to deal with sabotage by the union they were members of, and the double-edged involvement of the British, Kurdish and Turkish left wing organisations.
The Dispute exposed the exploitation of immigrant and low paid workers through fear and intimidation. It also exposed the failure of the British Trade Union bureaucracy to give any meaningful support to such workers. This short pamphlet has been put together in recognition that struggles such as that waged by the JJ workers need to be documented and discussed.
There are no reliable figures on exactly how many Turkish speaking workers there are in North London. An educated guess would be 50,000 plus. The Fast Food and Textile industries are significant employers of immigrant workers. Some of these businesses are run by Turkish or Kurdish bosses. However, in regard to the Textile Industry the firms are dependent on, or competing against powerful companies such as C&A and Debenhams who's buying power means they dictate and control the industry. [1]
Many of the workers have fled persecution and genocide in other countries. (2) On arrival in Britain, people are forced to take work in sweatshops or fast food warehouses and outlets, where a 70-hour week for £100 is normal (1). Significantly, the British State has continued to intensify its harassment, detention or forced dispersal of immigrant workers. The main intention is to create racist divisions and tension between communities in London and beyond and to make it more difficult for these communities to organise with others against those who are oppressing them.
Union organisation is virtually non-existence in these industries. The British TUC affiliated unions have shown little interest in supporting immigrant workers and no strategy or structure for winning better conditions where many workers' immigration status is problematic.
Occasionally, left wing groups or the odd TGWU (Transport and General Workers' Union) full-timer distribute union recruitment material. But no real workplace organisation exists further than the level of paper membership and token 'recognition'. The TGWU and GMB (General, Municipal and Boilermakers' Union), both of whom claim to represent Textile and Fast Food workers, do not have a Turkish speaking official. Generally these workers have been isolated from what is left of the 'British' labour movement and from the British working class. The JJ Dispute started to change all of this.
The JJ Fast Food workers were working 60-70 hour weeks for around £130 a week under intolerable conditions. A working day could last from 5am to 5pm. There was no proper lunch or tea breaks, even for loaders who worked in sub zero temperatures. There was no overtime, holiday or sick pay. Drivers themselves had to pay out for any counterfeit money they were given, parking fines and damage to trucks.
In the face of all this, 45 of a total of 75 workers joined the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU)) over the summer of 1995. These included Turkish, Kurdish, Cypriot and Russian workers but it was mainly at the initiative of the Kurdish workers, who included members of communist or socialist organisations and who had been involved in political and union activity in Turkey and Kurdistan. The workers elected a union representative [shop steward] at a mass meeting and put forward some basic demands, mainly on Health and Safety issues. The boss, Mustafa Kamil, immediately tried to divide the workers, and isolate the activists. He sacked the Shop Steward over the phone.