… trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it
—Judith Butler
As a teenager, Fatima Djalo dreamed of being a doctor. When she was twelve years old, her mother – a single parent who was left to bring up the family alone after Fatima’s father was killed in a bicycle accident – sold her rickety camp bed, gave the money to Fatima’s older sister, and instructed her to take Fatima to the city. ‘She wanted me to study, and she ended up sleeping on the floor to make that possible,’ remembers Fatima. ‘To this day, I’m the only one of my siblings who can read or write.’
The journey west from Sonaco, a small town in the grassy interior of Guinea-Bissau, was 120 miles long and a bus ran once a week. This was the mid-1970s, and the early, febrile days of a brand-new nation on Africa’s Atlantic coastline that had just fought a bitter war of independence against the Portuguese; the roads were hard, and sometimes dangerous. But Fatima wasn’t scared, not really – the fear inside her got crowded out by the thrill. She had grown up in a place where life was often difficult, and food, healthcare and education scarce. Her father had been an informal tradesman, purchasing bits and bobs where he could and selling them on to anyone who would take them; her mother cooked for locals in a kitchen. Her sisters would soon be married off, and one would go on to have fourteen children. For Fatima, the ticket to Bissau, Guinea-Bissau’s bustling port capital, was a doorway to a future that was foggy, but different.
At first, things went well – Fatima enjoyed her lessons, and adjusted to a world far removed from her old home. But when it came to choosing specialist courses and preparing for an adult career, that wasn’t enough. Becoming a doctor meant studying medicine, and studying medicine meant lots of extra school fees that Fatima and her family didn’t have. Instead she became a secretary, typing by day and living frugally by night, saving and saving until one day, at the age of seventeen, she had enough money to buy another ticket to a different future, this time consisting of a plane to Lisbon. ‘I didn’t know anyone in Portugal,’ she tells me. ‘My plan was to finally get the chance to study further, but it didn’t work out.’ She ended up doing low-paid work to survive on this unfamiliar continent, eventually starting a family of her own. Still, the lure of an alternative existence – somewhere else just over the horizon, one more door away – endured. In 2008, in the thick of the global financial crisis, Fatima folded up her life again and made her way to London. She knew it would be tough – like Lisbon was, and Bissau before it, and Sonaco before that – because ultimately everywhere is tough, even if the shape and texture of that toughness varies from place to place and the strain feels differently against your skin. ‘But I thought things would be better,’ she says. ‘I wanted to become a bus driver.’ Bus drivers have secure jobs and get to explore vast portions of the city; they are a highly visible part of the urban infrastructure, and everyone can see how much they’re needed. ‘I had lots of hopes when I arrived here,’ smiles Fatima. ‘But that’s life: nothing works out as you planned.’
For the past decade, far from exploring vast portions of the city, Fatima has run on rails. She wakes up in the early hours of the morning to be in with a chance of being able to use the bathroom at her small house in Stratford, which she shares with nine strangers – some are Italian, she thinks, and some might be Eastern European, but nobody socialises with one another as they’re all too busy working, so she can’t really be sure. Almost every possession Fatima owns remains permanently packed in two large suitcases, because she knows what the landlord is capable of: he demands payments in cash, and retains a personal key to every room. ‘I have my creams and my hair products out on the side table, and that’s it,’ she explains. ‘When he throws me out on to the street, I’ll be ready.’ By 6.30 a.m. she’s on the tube and heading to the Ministry of Justice headquarters near St James’s Park for the first of two jobs. Over the next nine hours she will walk up and down sixteen floors of UK government office space, cleaning each of the male and female toilets on every floor five times per working day. She will walk for miles and miles, until 5 p.m., when she will gather her things, walk down the road for half a mile more, and begin another set of cleaning rounds – this time at the Supreme Court. For all this, she will be paid £7.83 per hour, the legal minimum wage for her age.1 By the time she gets home, it will be past 9 p.m., and she will be exhausted. She spends her weekends at home, queuing up to use the house’s single washing machine, and catching up on sleep. And then on Monday, she will start all over again. ‘It isn’t any kind of life,’ she says.
But today is a different kind of life. Today, she is spinning in the middle of a Westminster pavement as rain pours from the sky, with glitter on her face and strips of ticker tape in her hair. She is blowing on a horn and dancing deliriously, flanked by a line of security guards on one side and a line of police officers on the other. The air is fat with music and shouting and flare-smoke and promise, and Fatima, now fifty-four, is at the heart of it all, walking through yet another doorway into the unknown.
Work structures our world, outside and in. We use it to define ourselves, to weigh our own worth and that of others, to mark the passage from childhood to maturity, and most importantly to survive. Our politicians, economists and media commentators rely on work to measure how well we are doing as a nation; its vital statistics are common shorthand for the health of our society. Yet in modern Britain, work is in crisis. Following the financial crash, real wages in Britain have fallen by a percentage point every year; by the mid-2010s the typical worker was earning 10% less than they were before 2008 and some had lost over a third of their earnings – compared to average wage rises over that period of 11% in France, 14% in Germany, and 23% in Poland.2 Seven in ten workers in the UK are now ‘chronically broke’, according to a major study by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA),3 and the level of ‘wage theft’ from workers by unscrupulous employers is conservatively estimated at £4.5 billion per year.4 ‘Work is the best route out of poverty,’ Theresa May declared on several occasions, wrongly.5 In fact, 7 million people in Britain living below the bread line – that’s two-thirds of all those in poverty – have jobs, but jobs that simply do not pay enough.6 ‘There’s no justice for workers here and it doesn’t seem like there’s much justice for workers anywhere in this country,’ Fatima once said to me as we stood outside the Ministry of Justice entrance doors, and the statistics bear her out. The Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane has described the ten years following the crash as a ‘lost decade’ for workers in Britain; economic insecurity for workers, according to the RSA, is now the ‘new normal’.7
The story of what has happened to workers – of how that insecurity got normalised – is part of a wider tale about the ways in which processes of economic production have been altered under the twin influences of globalisation and financialisation. Gone are the days of mammoth, vertically integrated industries stockpiling everything one needs to build a car, run a communications network or retail groceries to consumers; now goods zip back and forth across borders via ‘just in time’ supply chains, spending as few moments as possible on a warehouse shelf. They are ferried along by a workforce subjected to fewer benefits, greater outsourcing, and more temporary contracts that ebb and flow in accordance with the needs of capital than at any other time since the end of the Second World War. As all aspects of production become computerised, the companies best placed to flourish are increasingly the ones able to collect, interpret and exploit the vast reams of data generated by economic activity, fuelling the rise of competing ‘platforms’, specialised in everything from aircraft engines to website infrastructure, whose aim is to control the ground upon which everyone else does business.8 Some of those same technologies and business models have fuelled a cornucopia of more consumer-facing, on-demand services – from food delivery to DIY and driving – providing plentiful but casual work for millions at the bottom end of the labour market; between 2016 and 2019 the number of people working for digital platforms in the UK doubled to 4.7 million, almost one in ten of the entire workforce.9 Meanwhile younger workers in traditional professions are being ‘proletarianised’ as their wages fail to keep pace with the rising cost of living: early-career lawyers, lecturers, accountants or architects face lower pay, less stable jobs, poorer working conditions and higher levels of freelancing than their older colleagues ever experienced, and even junior judges are operating under zero-hours contract conditions.10 Up to 10 million people in Britain are now estimated to be in some form of precarious work, a trend that stretches well beyond the newfangled ‘gig economy’ and into occupations that have existed for centuries, like teaching, caring and hospitality.11 Across all these sectors, talk of workplace ‘flexibility’ is increasingly entwined with new forms of intensive management – often, in many industries, now conducted by algorithms rather than human bosses – and the growing surveillance of workers that goes with it.
These tendencies have atomised and fragmented workers, especially because they have been accompanied by a relentless political assault on trade unions. Organised labour, runs the prevailing narrative, has never been weaker when set against the growing power of capital. Official trade union membership figures support this: whereas half of all workers carried a union card in the 1970s, only a fifth do so today. Among young people in the private sector, where most economic growth is concentrated, that figure falls to 6%. In 2017 the number of strikes in the UK was the lowest since records began and the number of total strike days lost numbered just 170,000 – compared to 29.5 million in 1979, year of the so-called ‘Winter of Discontent’.12 ‘The strike is dead. Or near as dead as makes no difference,’ claimed Sean O’Grady, a senior editor at the Independent newspaper, in response to those figures.13 O’Grady went on to marshal a familiar argument as to why union activism was apparently withering. ‘The reasons for this historic level of UK industrial calm are well known,’ he explained. ‘Unions are nowhere near as powerful as once they were. That, in turn, is down to structural changes in the workforce, such as casualisation – how does a freelance journalist, for example, go on strike? The gig economy and the rise of self-employment have also destroyed the very concept of a strike, because you can’t go on strike against yourself, or work to rule when it’s you making the rules, can you?’
All of which makes sense – if the only kind of labour militancy you’re familiar with looks like the battles of the past, with old-school, beer-swilling union bosses on one side of a table hammering it out with buttoned-up corporate executives on the other. But it doesn’t account for how, in the places where workers are seemingly most marginalised and vulnerable, an unlikely movement is currently under way to rewire the economy from within. O’Grady’s argument has nothing to say about the maintenance cupboards where agency staff are busy plotting wildcat walkouts, nor about the takeaway couriers using their bikes and motorcycles to bring major roads to a standstill, nor about the glitzy London gallery openings that are being overrun by protesting workers, nor about the warehouse operatives organising clandestinely through WhatsApp, nor about the pub pint-pullers and the film ushers and the security guards and the video-game coders who are watching all this, learning, and following suit. It has nothing to say about Fatima, and her defiant, dizzying dancing in the rain, because it has failed to notice how the changing economy has fuelled new and dramatic forms of workers’ resistance, and exposed new frailties for capital. The reality is that labour militancy hasn’t died at all. It is simply playing out on fresh terrain, and fizzing with life as it does so.
*
In the early hours of 1 May 2018, I drove to a provincial roundabout on the outskirts of Cambridge to see what that fresh terrain looks like. It was a bright, cloudless morning, and on the edge of a McDonald’s car park, rising above the dawn traffic on Newmarket Road, a twenty-four-year-old named Tom Holliday was bellowing into a megaphone. ‘I!’ he shouted, throwing his whole upper body into the cry. ‘I!’ echoed a crowd of onlookers. ‘Believe!’ Tom continued. ‘Believe!’ the group responded. ‘That we!’ he roared, ‘Will win!’ Those around Tom bobbed up and down to the chant, and a thickset man with a shaved head and long overcoat who was standing further off by the restaurant doors quietly took a notebook out of his pocket and scribbled something down. I wandered over to chat, but he wouldn’t tell me his name or job title. ‘Direct all your questions to the McDonald’s national press office,’ he said curtly, staring past me.
The man’s irritation, and that of the McDonald’s management team he represented, was understandable. This was the workforce that supposedly could not be unionised, the company whose virtually limitless financial power and global reach meant that in any battle with its low-pay, insecure employees, the latter would always be crushed. But now instead of standing behind the counter and serving up Egg McMuffins for the morning rush, Tom was out here by the roundabout, demanding a living wage of £10 an hour and sending rhythmic jolts through potential customers with yells of ‘If we don’t get it, shut it down!’ He was joined by his colleague Annalise Peters, a twenty-year-old student studying French and economics who looked part proud, part awestruck to be the focus of so much attention. Later, as we travelled fifty miles south to join up with other striking McDonald’s staff in Watford, the home town of company CEO Steve Easterbrook (who in 2017 was paid £8,200 per hour, 113,000% more than his striking staff), we were also joined by twenty-six-year-old local Richard Shattock, by twenty-three-year-old Ali Waqar from Manchester, by his co-worker Lauren McCourt, by Shen Batmaz and Lewis Baker from Crayford, and by many, many others: all young, pissed off and fearless, all pumped with that unique tincture of exasperation and elation that comes when you’re at the end of your tether but have resolved to do something about it.14 ‘It’s hard because everyone is spread out, everyone is on different shift patterns,’ explained Annalise, who had been trying to organise her fellow staff at the Cambridge branch for nearly a year. ‘It was kind of scary because McDonald’s just hasn’t seen this sort of thing in the UK before; they put a lot of messaging out there which is anti-union, anti-rights, and there was a lot of push-back from management. To be honest with you, I think the managers were scared as well. They didn’t know what they were dealing with.’
What management were dealing with was a slow spread of whispers – from shift to shift, restaurant to restaurant – announcing that things didn’t have to be this way, and that some people were organising to change them. ‘You hear the stories all the time at work: how everyone is struggling to pay their bills, what an awful experience they have if they get ill, if they fall out with a manager who can then mess with their hours,’ Ali told me. ‘They don’t see us as humans, or workers.’ Lauren, who was earning £7.25 an hour at McDonald’s – which equates to £290 for a forty-hour working week – agreed. ‘We’re worker-bots to them,’ she said. She often relied on the single free meal she received at work to see her through the day, and was in constant fear of being made homeless. Ali, who like two-thirds of single Britons in their twenties was still living with his parents, described the choice he faced between working enough shifts to keep his head above water, or spending any time with family or friends.15 ‘Human beings are social animals, we’re supposed to be able to connect with one another,’ he said. ‘People are sick of having to deal with that shit. The problem is how to translate those feelings into organising; there’s a lot of obstacles in the way, a lot of misinformation. The biggest issue is that there’s a systematic lack of knowledge about workers’ struggle that has been building for decades, and most people our age just don’t know what a union is.’
The solution, according to Shen – who helped organise the very first ‘McStrike’ in the UK back in 2017 – was to simply start up conversations in the workplace about the lived experience of colleagues. ‘I know it sounds really small and stupid, but no one normally comes up to you and just asks, “How are you doing? Is your money situation OK, is your living situation OK, are you getting by, what’s happening?”’ she explained. ‘People will talk to you for hours if you ask them that, and if you show them that you really care. And then the next stage is to say, “OK, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to live on low pay, are you going to be bullied by this manager every day, are you going to live like this for as long as they make you live like this, or are you going to stand up?”’ Shen said she often asked her colleagues whether they agreed with the American civil rights movement, or the suffragettes, to which the answer would invariably be yes. ‘And I’m like, “Well if you were there at that time, would you have joined those movements and done something?” And people would say yes, of course, because we all like to think we would fight back if we were in the shit, if those around us were in the shit. And so I’d say, “Well we’re in the shit now, so let’s do something now.” You can pass out as many leaflets as you want, you can put up as many posters as you want, but unless you’re actually in the workplace, having these conversations, then nothing is going to happen.’
The organisation that Shen started having those conversations with, and for which she now works, was the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union (BFAWU) – a movement that is more than 170 years old, but displays a keen understanding of the specific problems faced by workers in the twenty-first century, particularly the children of the financial crisis like Annalise, Ali and Lauren. ‘Young people today are angry,’ says Sarah Woolley, a thirty-one-year-old who started work aged sixteen at the bakery chain now known as Greggs, and went on to become a full-time BFAWU official. She knows of McDonald’s employees who sofa-surf because they cannot afford rent, employees who spend the night in their cars, employees who sleep on an inflatable mattress with a slow puncture that requires them to get up every few hours to blow it up again. ‘They’re angry because the lives their parents had are beyond them. I’ll be lucky to retire when I’m seventy; there are young people today who feel like they’ll be lucky to retire at all. You talk to young people about holidays and they look at you like “what do you mean, holidays?” Young people are so poor they’re not reproducing, they’re postponing having children because they simply can’t afford to. All of the things they were promised growing up are not there for them when they do.’
Crucially, argues Sarah, the very casualisation and insecurity that Sean O’Grady believes is destroying worker militancy is actually fuelling it, because with so many precarious minimum-wage jobs available offering equally crap conditions, there is nothing much to risk by fighting back. ‘Young people today are generally not burdened by mortgages,’ she says. ‘Thatcher’s dream was to load workers with debt, frighten them into not taking strike action for fear of losing their home, and often it worked. But most young workers don’t own homes now, they’re more likely to be sharing rent with five or six people. So workers in the fast-food and hospitality sectors are not afraid of losing their jobs in the same way as older generations were, because they know that if they get sacked at KFC they can walk across the road to a Wetherspoons and get a similar job, on similar poor terms and conditions, and similar rubbish pay. This generation is not filled with the same fear of loss as the last generation because they’ve got nothing left to lose. That’s why young workers are more likely to take action, and that’s why young workers can win.’ Shen, with a wry smile, pointed out that she is the perfect example of this. ‘I’m twenty-three, and I have none of the opportunities that my parents had,’ she told me. ‘My dad was an immigrant to this country, and so that’s saying something – the fact that he had so many opportunities and my mum had so many opportunities, compared to me. I won’t ever own a house, at least it seems like that at the moment. I’m in twenty grand worth of debt as I stand, and I don’t have any hope of paying it off. So again, that question – are you going to live like this for as long as they make you live like this, or are you going to stand up? Once someone asks you it explicitly, when you’re forced into that moment where you have to think about it and answer one way or another …’ She trailed off, and shrugged. ‘You’re already in the shit, so why not do something?’
In Cambridge, at the start of the day, just after an initially murderous-looking drive-thru customer was persuaded to respect the picket line and turn back around without his milkshake – ‘I explained what the protest was about, and also pointed out that he wasn’t wearing a seat belt which is a bad look for the cameras, and lo and behold he decided to support us,’ grinned Martin Harding, a member of the Fire Brigades Union who had turned up in solidarity with the McStrikers – a young Hungarian woman came up to me and asked what was going on. After telling her about the strike, she snapped some pictures on her phone excitedly and sent them to a WhatsApp group of her colleagues. It turns out she worked at a Starbucks branch in town on a zero-hours contract. She didn’t want me to publish her name, and nor did she want to chat to the union organisers – for now, she said, she just wanted to watch. She did just that for what seemed like ages, brushing her hair out of her eyes as the wind swirled around us and nodding softly at Tom’s chants. ‘We should do this,’ she concluded, thoughtfully. ‘We should be doing this now.’ Later, outside the McDonald’s store in Watford, I mentioned this encounter to Richard, one of the workers there who had walked out to join the strike. A few moments beforehand he had been up on a soapbox, addressing his managers – who were watching on through the restaurant windows – with such candour and vehemence that it almost hurt to watch: ‘You cannot belittle me, you cannot belittle my friends and comrades in our union and in our workplace,’ he belted into a microphone, as if daring them to come out and contradict him. Now he was back down on the pavement, wiping the sweat off his brow and swigging from a bottle of water. He’d be back at work tomorrow, and given the speech he’d just made things ‘might be a little awkward’, he remarked cheerfully, in what struck me as a drastic understatement. But Richard was more interested in the Starbucks woman, and her brief exposure to the McStrike movement, than he was in discussing the potential personal consequences. ‘I believe 100% that we are inspiring other precarious workers, people like her,’ he said, breathlessly. ‘Because this is not really about McDonalds alone, it is about momentum building up, confidence spreading, and a ball rolling up and down the high street, up and down the country.’
A ball is rolling. Five months later, McDonald’s workers walked out again, this time accompanied by striking workers from Wetherspoons, TGI Fridays, Deliveroo and Uber Eats, all demanding a living wage. As well as the McDonald’s branches that had taken part in the May Day action, strikes or protests were also recorded in that single October morning at fast-food or pub outlets in London, Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Plymouth, Southampton, Milton Keynes, Glasgow and Cardiff. In the past two years, the struggle for a living wage has been taken up by low-paid workers at Sports Direct, Addison Lee, the Picturehouse cinema chain, City Sprint couriers, the catering giant Compass, the pathology service-provider TDL, the University of London, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Opera House and the National Gallery, to name but a few. There is no area of the economy untouched by this wave of protest: no product you have bought, or service you have used, or cultural event you have enjoyed that does not, if you unspool and follow the threads which lie behind it, have a recent workers’ confrontation knotted deep within its ecosystem. Some of these mobilisations, such as the McStrike movement, are being led by large, traditional unions like the BFAWU; others, like most of the Deliveroo actions, are not formally organised at all, arising instead out of loose and sometimes spontaneous networks of colleagues. In between those two poles, though, lies something else: a new generation of small, radical, insurgent trade unions that, beyond the radar of most mainstream media outlets, are racking up improbable victories and bringing giant corporations to heel. They’re doing it by rethinking what worker militancy looks like, by ignoring all the old rules of union organising, and by putting their faith in people like Fatima – the invisible woman at the heart of Westminster, who decided to make herself seen.
*
In room L67, deep within the bowels of SOAS University’s Russell Square campus in central London, a poet, a politician and a sex worker are making polite conversation. United Voices of the World (UVW) don’t really do ground level, except when they’re marching through streets and blockading entrance doors. Renting ground-level spaces costs money, and UVW has very little of that; instead their meetings tend to take place either below the earth or high above it, looking up or down at the land they plan to storm. Merrily, chaotically, people stream in and find chairs. Then the introductions begin. Everyone in the room takes a turn saying hello; three different languages are spoken, and each word is patiently, painstakingly interpreted for the benefit of everyone else – Nick handling Spanish, and Molly responsible for Portuguese. ‘For many in this room,’ declares Petros – a lumbering, friendly bear of a man who co-founded UVW in 2014 and remains a key organiser – ‘the action next week will be their first strike, and that’s a big deal. The stakes are high for the workers involved, and they’re high beyond that: these strikes are important politically, socially and culturally. We can set an example here, and leave other unions with no excuse not to follow in our footsteps.’ A murmur of approval seeps through the room, triple-staggered as the translations are completed. All the while Petros is speaking, there are fresh arrivals: waving latecomers, groaning buggies, and piles of snacks being repeatedly manoeuvred into position. What started out as a small circle gradually widens and fills to such an extent that it becomes impossible to say where the focal point of the meeting is, or even if there is supposed to be a focal point at all.
There are other trade unionists present, alongside Class War anarchists, earnest students and veterans of UVW’s previous campaigns: outsourced cleaners like Susana, for example, who was fired from her job at Topshop for union organising and won an epic legal fight, or Beverley, who helped force the London School of Economics to bring the employment of her and her colleagues in-house. Everyone, without exception, is clapped by everyone else when they have finished saying their hellos, not least because these introductions – which take well over an hour – are not mere formalities or an adjunct to the main proceedings, but the very point of why we’re here: they make the breadth of solidarity tangible and visible, large enough and bright enough that you can pick it out with your eyes. The heartiest cheers are reserved for the last group to rise to their feet and address the room: outsourced cleaners from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and from the Ministry of Justice, who will be walking out of their workplaces as part of UVW’s first ever co-ordinated multi-employer strike in three days’ time. ‘I’ve never been in a struggle like this, but I can see now that there’s a lot of people fighting like us,’ says Marianna Crespo, a tall, refined woman with dark red hair tied back in a ponytail, who sweeps the floors at the town hall of Britain’s richest council. Her colleague Suzete, clad in a stunning print dress and wearing a waterfall of earrings, tells us about the health problems she has suffered in her job and how the outsourcing company which controls her work, Amey – part of the multinational contractor giant Ferrovial, which recorded a net profit of €454 million in 2017 – had washed their hands of responsibility.16 ‘No one is made of steel,’ she concludes, prompting a flurry of nods. Carlos, a soft-spoken Brazilian with a thin, kind face who cleans the Ministry of Justice building, talks of how difficult life is when your earnings keep you anchored below the poverty line. ‘This is not just for us,’ he says. ‘We want to change our own history, but also the history of London.’ And then finally Fatima, beginning with a long silence and a deep breath to steady her nerves, stands to speak. ‘I’ve worked at the ministry for nine years,’ she begins. ‘In that time, we have been cleaning the same toilets for almost the same money, but we have been passed between lots of different companies, each of which mistreats us in different ways.’ There are managers who bully, she explains, and others who intimidate; as a cleaner, you can be accused of something small and impossible to verify, like bumping into someone with an equipment trolley, and then be placed on disciplinary measures that lead ultimately to dismissal. Fatima is not a natural public performer, like some in the room, but nor is she paralysed with anxiety, like others; she talks slowly, and compellingly, using the breaks for translation as a chance to steady herself and go again. ‘In all that time, my pay has gone up by one pound an hour,’ she continues. ‘But just as bad is the lack of respect. They want people like us to hide away and make do with it.’
The tale of how Fatima, who speaks little English and has never previously been a member of a trade union (‘I didn’t know they existed,’ she told me), found UVW is, in her own words, a história complicada – as complicated, perhaps, as the story of UVW itself.17 When she ran into trouble with her bosses at both the Supreme Court and the Ministry of Justice on the same day a few years ago, Fatima’s colleague Eduardo at the latter told her about an organisation he had discovered that could represent workers like her and stand up to managers on their behalf. Without recognition agreements with employers or any advertising budget to speak of (in its last accounts, UVW recorded spending of £3,358 on office communications; the equivalent spend by Unite, Britain’s largest union, was just under £3.5 million18) the union relies almost entirely on word of mouth to reach new workers, and lives or dies on its reputation among members. With each campaign, that reputation has spread through networks of largely Latin American migrant communities: from the lowest-paid ‘facilities management’ staff at Sotheby’s auction house to the Barbican arts centre, from waiters and kitchen staff at Harrods to recycling-sorters at the dust-sodden Orion Waste plant in east London’s Canning Town, and cleaners at the gleaming towers of the Bank of New York Mellon at Canary Wharf up the road. ‘We met Petros at first,’ remembers Fatima, ‘but we couldn’t understand each other because he only spoke Spanish, not Portuguese. Then we spoke to Molly, and she explained everything to us and we felt the pride that would come with belonging to a union – our union.’
For Petros, that feeling of ownership on the part of members is what makes UVW different from the big, legacy unions of the past, and what is driving the organisation’s current record of success. ‘Being members-led is about internal democracy and decision-making processes, of course,’ he told me. ‘But it’s also about everything we do being in the interests of our members: every event, every activity, every strike. We could tell people, “join this union and we’ll send you emails for the next six months and get some MPs to talk about your campaign” and sure, those things might be useful components of a labour struggle. But they are not going to help build a movement and a community which empowers workers and puts workers at the forefront. We’re a fighting, members-led union because through us our members are struggling to be active agents in their workplace, to redefine their relationship not just with their bosses but also with the city they live in, the communities around them.’ At UVW, a trade union is not merely a service provider or lobbying organisation for its members, but rather something alive and antagonistic, something that percolates up from the shop floor and bleeds beyond the edges of the workplace.
That vision is born in part out of Petros’s early frustrations upon having returned to Britain from Venezuela, where he had spent a few years in the late 2000s. Like Ed and Jacob, founders of the Demand the Impossible radical education workshop that Layla, Kyle and Hannah ended up joining in Manchester, Petros found those years following the financial crash to be a disturbing wasteland of non-disturbance: everything had changed, and yet everything appeared to stay the same. He threw himself into Latin American solidarity activities in London, but found their limitations dispiriting, particularly when he came across migrants who had employment problems. At the Latin American Workers Association, where Petros volunteered most Saturdays to help with English classes, the best they could do was refer people to the gargantuan public-sector union UNISON. ‘I was looking for some way, any way, to directly support workers in their struggles,’ he remembers. ‘I wanted to offer whatever help I could, even though I didn’t know what that help was yet.’ In 2012, he saw references on Facebook to a picket line organised by the UK cleaners’ branch of the International Workers of the World (IWW), the venerable labour movement better known as the ‘Wobblies’ (the origin of the nickname is unknown, but theories range from it being an accidental mispronunciation of the organisation’s initials by non-native-English-speakers to it being a code word for industrial sabotage).19 He and his then partner, Vera Weghmann, decided to check it out, but ended up going to the wrong meeting place and only came across the striking workers by chance on their way home. It was a Sliding Doors moment; from then on, the pair threw themselves head-first into union organising. ‘I was so eager to get involved that at first they thought I was an undercover cop,’ Petros grinned.
When a family friend who knew Petros’s mother from the local church got in touch to say that she and her largely Brazilian and Colombian colleagues were being made redundant from their cleaning jobs at the medical school St George’s, University of London, Petros and Vera agreed to help represent them. In retrospect, it’s clear that the dynamics of that dispute would go on to shape the DNA of the yet-to-be-created United Voices of the World; at the time, however, they felt like they were making it up as they went along. ‘I googled some employment law and went into a meeting with the management,’ Petros said. ‘I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I put a load of questions to them and when they couldn’t answer I told them that what they were doing was illegal. We followed that up with a protest against the redundancies and thought, while we’re at it, fuck it, let’s demand the living wage as well.’ This fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach was a million miles away from the glacial, bureaucratic machinations of traditional trade union decision-making, including that of the local UNISON branch which had a formal recognition agreement at the time with St George’s and quickly distanced themselves from the cleaners’ militancy. ‘We are dealing with this diplomatically,’ insisted UNISON’s branch secretary, in a letter sent to those supporting the cleaners’ campaign. It went on to describe solidarity with the cleaners’ actions as ‘not appropriate’ and ‘unhelpful’.20 ‘I would ask you not to interfere in our branch affairs,’ the letter concluded. Petros and Vera pressed on: messages were sent to every member of staff at St George’s, petitions circulated, and friends and family mobilised to make some noise. Within a few days the redundancies were cancelled and the cleaners were granted a 30% pay rise. ‘We pulled this off with a handful of people, a few emails and flyers, the workers at the forefront, and we didn’t have to kidnap anybody,’ recalled Petros. UNISON, meanwhile, put out a press release taking credit for the victory and saying that they were delighted to see the cleaners finally obtain the living wage.21 ‘They didn’t know the name of a single cleaner there, let alone represent them or support our campaign in any way,’ spat Petros, still visibly angry all these years later. ‘We didn’t have a big organisation behind us, or any resources, but we got something out of nothing. My feeling was that we had won with so little, imagine what we could do with much more.’
UVW was founded in 2014, and that feeling – of winning with so little, and pushing at the limits of possibility to achieve even more – continues to permeate everything it does. ‘What we tried to do is create a trade unionism which fits the working environment of the twenty-first century,’ Vera told me. ‘And so we had to be creative, because that environment is different now.’ All members have an equal say in campaigns; UVW does not generally seek official recognition agreements with employers, has not affiliated with the national federation of trade unions, the TUC, and remains the only trade union in Britain not to have a general secretary. ‘We’re not interested in providing a doctor–patient relationship, where workers come along for a quick consultation and an expert diagnoses their problem and solves it for them,’ says Petros. ‘We are building a movement.’ At one of the union’s monthly gatherings, held in a dilapidated office space high above the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, I watched about seventy members work through employment law case studies below a huge UVW banner, creased and war-specked, which was affixed with pink fluorescent tape to a Blu Tack-stained wall. Around us lay the flotsam of countless autonomous struggles in the precarious economy: leaflets put out by the striking Ritzy cinema workers calling for a boycott of the Picturehouse chain; press cuttings about recent actions taken by UVW’s sister union, the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB); notes from the English Collective of Prostitutes, who were in ongoing talks with UVW about joining forces. ‘When are you entitled to a written contract and can you ask for it to be in Spanish?’ queried one young woman. ‘What if the boss tells you he prefers hiring Ecuadorians over Colombians?’ asked her friend. An older man in a smart hat, pink polka-dot shirt unbuttoned to the mid-chest and a silver cross swinging from his neck demanded to know whether it was legal for a manager to reduce your wages after you’d already started working for them. ‘It’s only legal for a manager to do this if he informs you of it and you don’t say no,’ replied Petros, the cranes and towers of south London’s skyline shimmering in the summer haze behind him. ‘It’s only possible if you don’t speak up, don’t join a union, don’t resist.’
On the last weekend before Fatima and her colleagues at the Ministry of Justice were set to walk out, alongside their counterparts at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, UVW held a fundraising party for the strike in a ramshackle old industrial unit in Hackney Wick. Excitement was building, and so were nerves. After half a decade as the most prominent face of UVW, Petros was stepping back for a while to make space for a new, all-female generation of organisers to take the lead, and it was a transitional moment for other reasons too. UVW had taken on some huge names in the past during its campaigns, but never, directly, the government itself; nor had it attempted to combine strikes by multiple workforces in multiple workplaces in a single action. Press interest was growing, and big, TUC-affiliated trade unions like the Public and Commercial Services Union were making noises about working with UVW to support the cleaners’ campaign. Always the underdog, always the outsider, it suddenly felt like UVW’s successes, achieved stubbornly and spectacularly on its own terms, had propelled it to the cusp of something bigger, although nobody knew quite what. ‘Next week is huge for us,’ Petros confided, fighting to raise his voice above the music. ‘I just hope …’ He trailed off, and gave me that apologetic smile you give when you can’t make yourself heard at a party. The venue, consisting of an outdoor corridor, an oversized living room, and a single loo (‘No drugs in toilet / PS anywhere else is good’ read a handwritten sign on the door) was furnished with a broken bathtub, a sheet of MDF serving as a makeshift bar, and a mishmash of sofas spilling their stuffing into the gloam. A small round stage had been erected at the back of the room, and on it a succession of pole dancers – the night had been co-organised by the East London Strippers Collective – whirled into light. Old wooden beams above our heads shook with the bass, and the space was heaving with people. Petros surveyed the scene with what seemed like an almost nostalgic satisfaction, then leaned his head towards me and tried again. ‘I just hope we do ourselves proud,’ he shouted.
*
In 1906, author Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle, which journeyed into the dark underbelly of the American food industry and revealed the indignities and abuses imposed upon its workers. At the heart of these abuses stood the factory assembly line, a relatively new innovation in mass production that was relentlessly and unapologetically engineered to ‘use everything about the hog except the squeal’.22 ‘It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics,’ observed Sinclair, who had spent weeks labouring undercover in the Chicago meat-packing district to gather material. And it wasn’t only the pigs which he saw as being disembowelled by this technological leap forward; like many who were concerned about the future of working-class organisation throughout the early part of the twentieth century, Sinclair feared that the assembly line could destroy the power and militancy of those who manned it too. ‘They were beaten,’ he wrote of his two main protagonists, Lithuanian immigrants struggling to cling on to their humanity and survive on the edges of a brutal economy. ‘They had lost the game, they were swept aside.’23
But the assembly line, which offered such advantages to capital in the form of increased efficiency and profit and initially threatened to homogenise and deskill industrial work, handing technical control of production to managers and making it easier to draft in reserve armies of casual labour – severely weakening the collective bargaining power of workers in the process – did not result in the collapse of labour militancy.24 In fact, the opposite occurred: by the mid-1930s, when a huge strike wave roiled America’s auto industry, it was clear that this technology also provided workers with new pressure points to exploit, new opportunities to disrupt. After the great sit-in at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan in late 1936 and early 1937, which lasted for forty-four days and saw workers using hinges and bolts to fend off armed police who were trying to seize the factory, it became apparent that even a small number of labour activists in a single plant were capable of bringing the whole assembly line to a halt, and that gumming up production in one location had a knock-on effect across a company’s entire corporate empire.25 As at every stage of capitalism’s evolution, new modes of economic production had simultaneously created new forms of exploitation and new forms of resistance – both of them drawing on the same tools.
If Sinclair were writing a novel about dehumanising work in the post-crash economy today, it might be Amazon warehouses in towns like Tilbury that he would seek out: the meat-packing assembly lines of our own age, where technological advances meld with capital’s need to extract every last ounce of efficiency from its workforce. Like the McStrike protesters, Amazon employees complain of being seen as robots by their bosses, who electronically track the speed of their work, subject them to impossibly ambitious performance targets, and force them to toil through sickness and late-stage pregnancy. A union has also reported being told of a woman who claims to have suffered a miscarriage on the job (‘We don’t recognise these allegations as an accurate portrayal of activities in our buildings,’ responded Amazon in a statement).26 In the US, Amazon has been granted patents for ultrasonic wristbands which, when attached to workers, are capable of tracking their every hand movement and providing ‘haptic feedback’ (i.e. vibrations) if it detects that a worker is carrying out their tasks suboptimally.27 As far as monitoring of workers goes, such wristbands may already be outdated. In 2017, a vending-machines company in Wisconsin made global headlines by microchipping dozens of its workers; when paired with a GPS app, anyone with the appropriate authorisations can track the wearer’s location twenty-four hours a day. ‘We decided to put it in employees as a form of convenience for them,’ explained CEO Todd Westby.28 ‘We do not plan on taking it out.’ Some Chinese firms have reportedly implanted sensors in hats and helmets which scan workers’ brainwaves to detect feelings of fatigue, stress and anger.29
Brain-scanning helmets and their ilk fascinate us because they appear to be quirky outliers, portending some vaguely dystopian future. But an entire sub-industry of employer surveillance tools has evolved in recent years to enable bosses to follow their workers’ web activity, the strokes of their keyboard, and even the tone of their voice.30 And for many tens of thousands of workers in Britain’s gig economy, core elements of that dystopian future are here now, already mundane. The work of most Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers, for example, is governed almost entirely by the companies’ smartphone apps; their only physical contact with the firms comes when they initially sign up, and even then it is likely to involve nothing more than a meeting with another precarious worker brought in to staff the recruitment centres.31 Sinclair described a world of work in which figures of authority were ever-present on the assembly line, ‘ranged in ranks and grades like an army … managers and superintendents and foremen, each one driving the man next below him and trying to squeeze out of him as much work as possible’.32 Over a hundred years later that process of management has, for many of us, been entirely automated: it is the app itself that assigns jobs, records and ranks performance, and delivers feedback in the form of both incentives and discipline. Jamie Woodcock, a sociologist of work at Oxford University, calls this ‘management by algorithmic panopticon’, in reference to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a prison and surveillance system in which inmates are motivated into submission by the knowledge that they are potentially being watched at any time. ‘Deliveroo workers have detailed how “there isn’t that person telling you what to do, it’s the algorithm” and that “the algorithm is the boss”,’ says Woodcock.33 ‘The management function comes mainly in the form of emails that rate performance – although these don’t tell workers the actual targets, only whether they were meeting them or not. This introduces that demand to self-regulate found with the panopticon, inculcating the feeling of being constantly tracked and watched, despite the lack of a physical boss or supervisor.’ As James Farrar, an Uber driver and chair of the United Private Hire Drivers branch of the IWGB – UVW’s sister union – points out, algorithmic management disempowers workers in relation to capital not only through the imposition of constant surveillance, but also through an imbalance in access to the data generated by it. ‘They do collect an awful lot of information,’ he says.34 ‘One of the things they will report to you on a daily basis is how good your acceleration and braking has been. You get a rating. The question is: why are they collecting that information? My concern with it is, this information is being fed into a dispatch algorithm [the automated app-based process deciding which drivers are assigned journeys requested by customers]. We should have access to the data, and understand how it’s being used.’
With this level of technological surveillance by bosses, and the asymmetries of power created by their one-way control over the information gathered, what hope remains for workers’ attempts to challenge their decisions – especially when that technology is embedded within an employment system that classifies Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers as self-employed contractors, shorn of many basic labour rights? The answer is: plenty. As Woodcock puts it, the digital outsourcing model upon which Uber and Deliveroo are built throws up a double precariousness: one for workers, who enjoy little protection if they are injured on the job or find their earnings dipping below the minimum wage, and another for bosses – who, with virtually no human managers overseeing their workforce, have few tools at their disposal to deal with organised resistance.35 And organised resistance by digitally outsourced workers has erupted repeatedly on the streets of major cities in recent years, usually beginning in the back-alley spots where delivery riders are encouraged by their apps to congregate and then fanning out rapidly through WhatsApp networks, word of mouth, and some technological trickery. In 2016, for example, an announcement by Deliveroo that it would soon be unilaterally altering its rider payment structure prompted a six-day ‘strike’ in which riders acted en masse to make themselves unavailable for orders.36 Colleagues from Deliveroo’s rivals, Uber Eats, swiftly followed suit, and began taking advantage of a promotional offer within the app which granted new customers £5 off their first order. By repeatedly creating new accounts and ordering low-value meals to be delivered to the picket line, the strikers amassed both a mountain of free food at Uber’s expense and a steady stream of fellow riders, who would turn up with the order only to be met by a sea of radicalised peers cheering their arrival and chanting ‘Log out, log out!’ In the words of one Deliveroo rider, the very technology that was designed to control workers was now being turned against their managers, allowing riders to ‘occupy the system in a way’.37 Not unlike the assembly line of the last century, and the auto strikes in Flint that subverted it, a tool engineered for capital was being hacked by the labour force. ‘If it’s a wildcat strike,’ the Deliveroo rider told Woodcock, ‘it’s like a sit-in.’
That sort of hacking can be found throughout the contemporary economy. New apps abound which allow workers to log abuse by managers, read up on their rights, organise their workplace and compare pay rates both with those in similar jobs in their industry and with their own company’s financial results – a powerful weapon for agitating colleagues and rejecting management explanations for low wages.38 The information asymmetry at the core of digital platforms like Uber that union rep James Farrar referred to is being gradually undermined by a vibrant network of driver forums with hundreds of thousands of members sharing stories, advice, communications from Uber received through the app and payment details – including screenshots of receipts and monthly income tallies – enabling drivers to collectively gain an understanding of how the app’s secretive ratings systems and dispatch algorithms actually operate.39 Among other things, this sort of crowdsourced information provides drivers with the opportunity to game the system, for example by agreeing to log off from the app simultaneously, thereby tricking Uber’s algorithms into thinking there is a shortage of drivers and implementing surge pricing to tempt them back.40 Supermarket pickers – the staff who gather items from store shelves to fulfil online orders for home delivery – have developed an array of techniques to push back against the anxiety and humiliation that comes with missing impossible performance goals. Because targets for each worker are set by algorithms based on the speed with which they picked orders the previous week, as logged by handheld electronic devices carried by each member of staff, some pickers deliberately leave the handsets on during their lunch break so as to drive down their average speed and generate lower targets for the following week; others intentionally store their devices incorrectly in the charging station at the end of a shift, ensuring that the handset will run out of battery during work hours the next day and give them an extra unplanned break while a replacement is sorted.41 ‘These acts are just two examples of latent resistance with which workers are constantly experimenting to make their jobs easier,’ says Adam Barr, who worked as a picker at a large Sainsbury’s store in north London.42 He argues that these technologies are a platform upon which the workers’ struggles of the future will be fought.
Worker subversion of new management and surveillance technologies is merely one among many clandestine vulnerabilities inside the current economic system. Another can be found within those long, just-in-time supply chains that may appear to whip car parts and chicken meat and consumer electronics effortlessly across dozens of national borders but which are, in reality, almost entirely reliant on dense physical infrastructure. That network includes factories, warehouses and lorry depots, and the airports, stations, hotels, hospitals and schools that go with them: all firmly embedded in their geographical surroundings, and all highly susceptible to strike actions by those who maintain, guard and – like Fatima – clean them.43 In Britain, the cleaning sector alone employs 700,000 people.44 And, as the McStrike movement indicates, the very precariousness of those workers is itself a fuel for labour militancy; the more that low pay and casualisation becomes the norm, the more that those on the wrong end of it have nothing to lose by striking back. Previously, those with financial support from their family or the privilege of a higher education were generally able to avoid this kind of insecurity. Today, as the trade unionist and former Deliveroo rider Callum Cant argues, the middle is being hollowed out: there are a lucky few on a path towards permanent insulation from money worries, and the rest who are on a downward trajectory in terms of real-term income and work/life satisfaction.45 Half of all young people now attend university, where many will learn about times when things worked differently; after they graduate, the majority will join Britain’s fastest-growing social class, the ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’ – a stratum occupied by people whose background would traditionally have guaranteed a relatively secure and professionalised working life, but who instead find themselves struggling to make ends meet. Here, the gap between life expectations and outcomes yawns wide, and there is fertile soil from which shoots of resistance can grow taller.46
That is not to suggest that there are no gradations and contradictions within the large body of people increasingly disempowered by today’s economy. Those with salaried jobs, even under fast-degrading working conditions, still enjoy more security than their freelance or gig-economy counterparts. The working life of a self-employed creative professional, however stressful, is qualitatively different from that of somebody on a minimum-wage, zero-hours contract. It shouldn’t be forgotten that precarious employment has been the norm for centuries, and that for many around the world – especially in the global south – that fact of life has continued uninterrupted into the present day.47 ‘The young mother who now waits on call for a day’s work is the direct descendant of the nineteenth-century prole, hanging around the waterfront for a sliver of waged labour,’ the labour academic Steven Parfitt has observed.48 But what binds the lived experiences of many different social groups in the UK today is the sense that work in all its many guises is not working for them, and that there are tools within reach that might change that. In 2019, UVW reached another milestone with the opening of its Legal Sector Workers United division, bringing together paralegals, solicitors, barristers, receptionists, interns, personal assistants, administrative staff and cleaners. ‘We don’t ask who you are,’ explained Vera, arguing that the idea of trade union branches determined by a single job title is outdated. ‘What matters is that you want to achieve workers’ justice, and are happy to see workers in that struggle at the forefront.’
That struggle is global. It is not a coincidence that participants in the McStrike protests used chants adapted from the US ‘Fight for $15’ movement against low pay, nor that organisers from the SEIU – an American trade union representing precarious workers – joined the rally in Watford. The wildcat strikes by Deliveroo riders in British cities have been inspired and replicated by colleagues in Belgium, Holland, France, Germany, Australia and Hong Kong, to name but a few.49 On the WhatsApp thread shared by UVW’s organisers, barely a day goes by without a message from a similar union or workers’ collective abroad being forwarded on to the group – hotel chambermaids in Paris, textile operatives in Mexico, migrant workers in Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Moldova – requesting help, sharing advice, or offering solidarity. Historian Eric Hobsbawm once described surges in labour militancy as ‘accumulations of inflammable materials which only ignite periodically, as it were under compressions’.50 Throughout the post-crash world, such compressions are piling up at pace upon workers.51
*
Like all great rebellions, things didn’t really get started until the loudspeaker turned up. It was balanced perilously on a dodgy sack truck, big, dented and moth-eaten at the corners, packing a punch firm enough to shake walls. Up to that point, the picket line was solid, but dutiful: Molly, crouched in the Ministry of Justice doorway, shaking a bucket; Suzete handing out leaflets to tired-looking civil servants arriving early at their desks; Carlos and Fatima standing sentinel at each end of the giant UVW banner, stretching it out across the windows of government so that its fierce yellow canvas obscured the dark-tinted glass behind. Fatima had a plastic bag tied around her wrist that she had carefully filled with snacks and bottled water, and which she clung to tightly throughout the day. After the immense risks she and her colleagues had taken, all the frenzied anticipation and strained positivity that had been necessary to get to this point, I thought that she might feel deflated at the sight of so many of her desk-job colleagues ignoring the strike action and barging into the entrance foyer regardless; judging by how few of them stopped to engage with the cleaners on their way in, it appeared that hardly any of them looked upon Fatima as a colleague at all. But Fatima was beaming, her head held high in the early-morning sun, her smile cracking wider with each supportive car horn, each clink marking a donation to the strike fund, each original protest chant that Molly bellowed into the megaphone with a primal roar. ‘This is beautiful,’ she told me, surveying the scene. ‘I love it.’ Two days previously, an article about the forthcoming walkout had been published in the Observer, accompanied by a photo of Fatima. ‘You know, there was a particular woman here,’ Fatima divulged, chuckling with disbelief, ‘who came into one of the bathrooms recently while I was cleaning it and ordered me to move aside. I explained I had to be there to clean it, but she pushed me out of the way and walked in anyway. Well, yesterday that same woman came up to me because she saw my photo in the newspaper, and she said, “I’m sorry that I spoke to you really badly.”’ Fatima paused and looked up at the brutalist shell of 102 Petty France, the giant office complex which houses the ministry. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about that, and thinking about the strike today. She treated me like a human being. Now anyone who wants to mistreat us has to think twice.’ There was a screech, and then a crackle; earlier, someone had been sent off to the shops around Victoria to track down a working aux cord, and now someone else was trying to jam that cord experimentally into different connection points on the back of the speaker. After a further blast of unhappy static there was a click, and suddenly our little corner of Westminster convulsed with sound. The music was Spanish punk band Ska-P and their rollicking anthem ‘El Vals del Obrero’ (‘The Waltz of the Worker’). ‘¡Sí, señor! ¡Sí, señor! Somos la revolución, tu enemigo es el patron …’ the speaker blared, as passers-by cheered and Molly and Maria twirled manically around the pavement, clapping and hollering and chest-bumping with glee. ‘Yes, sir! Yes, sir! We are the revolution, your enemy is the master …’
Over the next three days, UVW’s most ambitious strike to date unfolded with a wild plasticity: if you tried to prod or push or contain it within one corner, it simply flowed around you and reformed somewhere else. Decisions were made on the hoof via text message, or impromptu huddles in the pub, or shouted questions and nodded answers flung over the noise of sirens. Everywhere was a fiesta, so much so that by the end it felt hard to imagine that any trade union protest could ever take place without being drenched in dancing, salsa and song. When the time came for the first movement of the flying picket line, necessitating a three-mile journey west from St James’s Park to Kensington and Chelsea town hall, we packed up and traipsed through the winding backstreets and major thoroughfares of Belgravia – Molly at the helm with a microphone, an inexhaustible font of choral dynamism, while Ministry of Justice striker Osvaldo and UVW’s unofficial photographer Gordon took turns to drag the speaker behind her, sweating hard and attempting gamely to keep it within Bluetooth range. I was under the impression that we were looking for the bus, the one UVW must have hired for the day to transport everyone between the different strike locations; it was only after fifteen minutes of haphazard marching that I realised we were looking for a bus, any bus, that happened to be travelling in the right direction. ‘I’m going to be a mother today and advise you to preserve your energy,’ Shiri – one of UVW’s key organisers – said quietly to Molly, as we rolled our mobile carnival through the doors of the No. 52. Onboard, someone began buttering dozens of sandwiches; someone else whipped out a laptop and began tapping out a press release on the fly. I looked around. No one was in charge, and although each person was doing all they could for everyone around them, nobody was doing anything on someone else’s behalf. There weren’t any passive victims or noble saviours to be found here, just a bunch of people crammed on to the top deck of a bus to Willesden Garage, fighting to take control of their future by organising collectively for themselves.
That evening, Kensington and Chelsea council held a planning meeting at the town hall. Concealed, to some degree, within a steady stream of genteel locals, UVW supporters filtered in to the conference room under the direction of scouts who had been sent ahead. Inside, the councillors were seated around a large table, flanked on one side by rows of chairs that were quickly filled by public attendees: neat lines of pastel shirts and floral dresses, interrupted occasionally by a green Mohican or a red UVW T-shirt reading ‘No más invisibles’ (‘Invisible No More’). The committee chair, Quentin Marshall – a Conservative councillor who is also director of Weatherbys, a private bank (he previously oversaw £30 billion of assets at Coutts) – opened proceedings with a somewhat nervous cough, and was swiftly interrupted by a yell from the back of the room demanding to know what the council was going to do about their cleaners’ campaign for a living wage.52 Marshall couldn’t see exactly where the question had come from, but he flashed a pained smile in its general direction. ‘Erm, thank you,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid that’s not one of the areas we’ll be discussing today.’ There was a rumble of dissent, and Petros clambered to his feet. ‘Excuse me, but I don’t accept that answer,’ he responded. Petros has the kind of voice that is set by default to thunder; it gives him a tremendous ability to fill a room with words, without ever sounding like he is breaking into a shout. ‘Everyone sitting around that table has the power to influence the outcome of a dispute that the cleaners are engaged in with the council. The cleaners have been impoverished by this council over the past ten, twenty, thirty years. They have been cruelly kept on the lowest possible legally minimum wages. They have been overworked, they have been disregarded, mistreated, disrespected, and they’ve been forced for the first time to take strike action today. All they’re asking for is £10.20 an hour, to be paid in a year what some of you guys claim in annual expenses.’
The councillors sat frozen; no one dared move or interrupt for fear of becoming the focal point of Petros’s fury. Two security guards stood braced by the door, waiting for instructions, but none materialised. It was as if all the power bound up in the minutes and schedules and paperwork on one side of the room had suddenly been angled on a slant; no one knew whether it would hold on, or tumble to the floor. ‘The contempt that you as councillors have held for the cleaners over the years is nauseating,’ continued Petros. ‘No matter how many hours your cleaners work they will live below the poverty line, and to be paid a wage which pushes you below the poverty line in this city, within a council that has so many millions in its coffers and so many rich councillors, is unforgivable. You are playing with these cleaners like they’re your bloody servants.’ Marshall glanced around the table in search of an escape route among his colleagues, but all their eyes avoided his. He pulled his shoulders back, swallowed and turned to face Petros. ‘Thank you very much for that contribution,’ he ventured, optimistically, ‘but as I mentioned this is a meeting to discuss planning and is not the right forum …’ Petros’s volume dial leapt up a notch; now he really was shouting. ‘The cleaners have been trying to have meetings with the council for the past three months!’ he boomed, and I saw Marshall wince at the force of it. ‘They have sent ten invitations to meet with the council’s leadership team, but no one has even had the common decency to provide an official response to the cleaners’ demands! So with all due respect this is the right forum, because you haven’t given them any other!’ Amid general uproar, Marshall rose and announced that he was adjourning the meeting; most of the other councillors joined him as he gathered his papers and made rapidly for a door that led to an inner chamber which was barred to the general public. That might have been that, except for the fact that the UVW supporters stayed where they were, singing and chanting and waving their banners until the last of the sunlight had gone and darkness was creeping through the windows. Eventually a councillor named Catherine Faulks, who sat on the council’s leadership team, addressed the occupation and suggested that senior council members could meet with the trade union in exchange for an end to the ongoing disorder. ‘Nine o’clock tomorrow morning, on the picket line,’ insisted Petros after conferring with those around him. You could tell from Faulks’s face that this wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all, but of course UVW rarely does what others have in mind, which is precisely how it had got as far as this. ‘OK,’ replied Faulks, looking weary. ‘We’ll come to the picket line in the morning, and we’ll talk about this.’
She was true to her word. Faulks was there at nine o’clock sharp, accompanied by three of her colleagues: Barry Quirk, the council’s chief executive; Sarah Addenbrooke, another member of the council’s leadership team; and Ian Wason, a newly elected councillor with a background in South African debt management.53 They stood at the bottom of the town hall steps, at the centre of a surreal tableau, with Petros and Maria on one side, a small group of police officers standing watchfully on the other, and a ring of people who for years had tidied the quartet’s desks, swept their floors and scrubbed their toilets surrounding them: Suzete and Mirna, Rafael and Marianna, Nestor, Alba, Alexandra and many more – some holding children in their arms, others clasping vuvuzelas, or maracas, or pots and pans in one hand and spoons with which to bang them in the other. The inhabitants of two realms of work that had long existed alongside one another, while remaining a universe apart, were now colliding, and it was obvious to anyone present who was drawing strength from that collision, and who was leaking it. ‘We’re not going to have this meeting out here, we’ll have to move it indoors,’ muttered Faulks to Quirk under her breath, but it was too late; Petros was already introducing everyone over the loudspeaker, and handing the microphone over to Faulks so that she could get things under way. She looked at it as if it were a hand grenade, then rallied. ‘Hello, hello, good morning,’ she began brightly, and then leapt out of her skin as Maria chimed in on a second microphone to translate her words for non-English speakers. Quirk, clad in a blue-check blazer and red tie, tried to nod supportively. Wason kept his hands crossed solemnly in front of him and alternated between staring down at the floor or up at the clouds, as if he were observing a minute’s silence, or about to launch into the national anthem. One by one they listened wordlessly, awkwardly, as the striking cleaners took turns to describe the impossibilities of their working lives, the challenge of surviving without a living wage, and the humiliation, as Nestor put it, of functioning ‘not as human beings, but machines’. After more than half an hour of this, Quirk apologised and explained he had another meeting to get to. ‘It’s been thirty-five minutes, and some of these cleaners have been waiting eight years for this opportunity,’ replied Petros, without skipping a beat. ‘I think a few more minutes are in order.’
At the end of it all, Quirk took a deep breath, asked for the microphone, and announced that the council would accept the implementation of a London Living Wage in principle, promising to set up a meeting between UVW and the overall leader of Kensington and Chelsea council, Elizabeth Campbell, to discuss the details. I was expecting a volley of cheers, but Petros didn’t flinch. He demanded that a date for the meeting was set there and then, and refused to draw anything to a close until that happened. Incredulously, Quirk and Faulks fished out their diaries and began flicking through pages in the breeze, as we all watched on without a sound: the cleaners, Petros and Maria, the rest of UVW’s supporters, the council administrators who were leaning out of their windows to catch a glimpse of what was happening, and the police, whose walkie-talkies occasionally hissed and spluttered across the silence. After some minutes, a day and a time were confirmed; the council representatives shook hands with each of the cleaners and took their leave. In the open air, a few feet below their offices but a million miles away from their comfort zone, they had been forced to fight a battle with low-pay Britain on unfamiliar terrain; they had been made to negotiate, made to supplicate, and they had lost. On the way back to the Ministry of Justice – we took the tube this time – the trusty speaker pumped out ‘Despacito’, and our carriage pulsed with joy. UVW rarely simply travel along the public transport network; they seem to ripple and reverberate through it, leaving inquisitive glances and involuntary grins in their wake, and that was never more true than now. Petros stood propped against a door, gasping hoarsely. Molly swung from a pole. Suzete was in tears. When we finally arrived back at 102 Petty France, there was little discussion needed. Nobody gave an order or made a signal, but everyone knew. A flare was released, a cry went up, and we surged past the security barriers to begin an occupation of the ministry.
It would be easy to dismiss Kensington and Chelsea council, and the Ministry of Justice, and McDonald’s, Uber and Deliveroo as the chief enemy in all this: cartoon villains that might be persuaded to do the right thing if only enough pressure could be applied to them. But the problem that those at the forefront of the movement against low pay and precariousness are confronting is not really unethical employers, nor uncaring managers, nor the flaws of new technology. What is pinning them down is the conviction that our current political economy is the only one available; that insecurity is an inevitable by-product of our yearning to escape the bad old days of Fordist drudgery, of our desire to be flexible and free. The choice so often presented to us is one between our current trajectory – with its haptic-feedback wristbands and the scrubbing of sixteen floors of toilets, five times each per day – and a retrograde return to the past; between the something workers have now and a nothing inside the space where an alternative should be. ‘As long as we accept disempowerment of workers in the name of greater efficiency, as long as we prioritise the rights of individual corporations to gain market share over our collective rights as people, then the underlying conditions will stay the same, and the exploitation epitomised by the gig economy will not go away,’ argues Wendy Liu, a former Silicon Valley software developer and start-up founder who now writes about labour, technology and political change.54 ‘We don’t necessarily need to return to the initial starting conditions. We can be much more ambitious than that: we can imagine an entirely different world, one that requires a fundamental rethinking of the current economic system.’ By exposing and jabbing at the limits of the way things are, Annalise, Richard, Shen, Tom and the other McStrikers, alongside Fatima and her many colleagues in UVW and its sister unions, are all on the front line of a battle to reimagine the way things could be. Their numbers are still small, and their actions seemingly amount to the merest flicker of change, easily missed amid the daily clamour of the cities which surround them. But the workforces they represent are what the workforces of tomorrow are increasingly going to look like, and the fights they are fighting now are the ones that will help define the future of work in this country for everyone. In the most recent set of figures, union membership, after a long period of decline, was shown to be on the up once again, particularly among the young.55 On one estimate, a quarter of the overall growth has come from the IWGB alone.56
UVW’s occupation of the Ministry of Justice entrance foyer did not last long. Within minutes of us storming the doors the police had arrived, security guards had been scrambled, and low-level managers were dispatched to identify strike leaders, set up meetings, and draw this immediate disruption to a close. In such a highly surveilled government building, ongoing protest inside the walls is virtually impossible, and besides, many of the cleaners couldn’t stay – they had second jobs to get to, or long commutes home to catch up on sleep before tomorrow’s shifts. But before the strike came officially to an end, one last rally was held in the street that runs alongside the front of the ministry, just as the sweltry weather turned and great sheets of rain began lashing down upon the flagstones. Someone produced a giant pink piñata – a papier-mâché pig stuffed with sweets and suspended from a stick – and the striking cleaners took turns battering it with a drumstick as we all danced around, singing and cheering and sliding in the torrent. When it came to Fatima’s go, she ignored the drumstick and grabbed a large umbrella. She was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt with no jacket, and had tied a sheet of clear plastic around her hair that had once formed part of a bin bag. She barely seemed to notice the deluge that poured off its creases and ran down her arms and legs. There would be many more strikes to come for the Ministry of Justice cleaners, and many more leaps into the unknown for UVW; within a few months Petros, Molly, Shiri, Susana and the rest would be organising new groups of workers – at strip clubs, at a city farm, at London’s Lion King musical and at luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel – and winning victories for underpaid staff in the most unlikely of quarters, including the offices of the Daily Mail. Boxing classes would be put on for female members, plans for a new office in Birmingham initiated, and new collaborations with major trade unions forged. In May 2019, the prime minister was even asked in Parliament about whether or not she would support UVW’s campaigns.
But at that moment, all Fatima was concentrating on was the piñata, and all of the might and muscle which had been necessary for her to take so many leaps into the unknown appeared just then to be coursing through her body. ‘This has changed my whole life, because for my whole life no one listened to me, and now they do,’ she had told me earlier. She brought the umbrella down with a crash upon the piñata again and again and again, until it burst open and a flood of brightly wrapped lollipops and ticker tape and glitter spilled forth and mingled brilliantly with the rain. Amid the celebrations, one of the ministry’s outsourced security guards who had been ordered to watch and contain us sidled up to a UVW organiser and asked for their contact details. He and his colleagues were fed up with their pay and working conditions, he explained quietly, and they wanted to join the union.