The Guardian 14 September, 2005
Airline Catering —
gourmet meal for venture capitalism
Gate Gourmet, the catering company that sacked 600 catering workers at Heathrow Airport (Britain), has been complaining in the media that it is cash-strapped and at the mercy of the wildcat strikers. Like all corporate spin, these complaints should not be taken at face value. Gate Gourmet is the second-largest airline catering company in the world, formed from the merger of several companies, including British Airways’ own catering wing. Not only does this arms-length arrangement allow British Airways to claim that it is not responsible for any low pay or mistreatment by Gourmet, it also limits action by BA staff in support of their fellow workers at Gate Gourmet.
The subsequent strike by baggage handlers who went out in solidarity with the sacked workers, most of them Asian women, lead to flights being grounded and caused travel chaos for tens of thousands of passengers.
It highlights the way companies are set up with complex structures of subsidiaries and parent companies to avoid responsibility and risk. An examination of Gourmet’s claims to be cash-strapped reveals a very different story.
Gourmet was bought up by a Texan venture capitalist firm in 2001 in a "leveraged buy out" (LBO). This concept involves firms buying up companies with money — mostly borrowed — in the hope of re-selling them for a handsome profit. Gate Gourmet is obliged to pay its parent company a certain level of "fees", which do not count as shareholder profits. So Gourmet can whine to the media that it is "losing" money, at the same time as it siphons off millions to its parent company (in 2004, Gate Gourmet contributed 16% of TPG’s US$2 billion profits) and the Texans strip it to the bone in the hope of a juicy sell-off.
The route to this sell-off also involved new plans for re-structuring the labour force — in other words, laying off many workers and making those that are left work for less. It now appears that this attack on the staff backfired on the Texans, prompting the wildcat response by Gourmet’s workforce.
The strike at Gate Gourmet is hence crucial on a number of different levels — it demonstrates the capacity of people to resist corporations at the practical level, and to resist the legal chicaneries that companies use to blindfold us to their real actions. No wonder that Gourmet has tried to limit strikers’ protests, using injunctions similar to those recently brought out against those active against cluster bomb manufacturer EDO in Brighton (UK). The stoppage has its own environmental spin-off due to the tonnes of greenhouse gases not emitted by grounded BA planes. As one caller to BBC news said, "I live under the Heathrow flight path and this is the first night I’ve had any peace and quiet. Up the workers!"
You can send an email of complaint to the Gate Gourmet bosses by going to this website:
http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=56
or http://www.labourstart.org and following the prompts.