The posh club v its workers: this low-pay battle says a lot about Britain

Author-Owen Jones

Staff are fighting for a living wage at a Mayfair club owned by a man who funded the Brexit campaign. They need our support

It is quite a scene. It’s a balmy summer afternoon, and 5 Hertford Street – described as “London’s most secretive club”, with an annual membership fee of £1,800 – is surrounded by union activists chanting: “Shame on you!” This is Shepherd Market, an enclave of Mayfair, which has overtaken Knightsbridge as London’s most expensive area, where Russian oligarchs brush shoulders with Saudi princes. As bemused punters at a pub opposite look on, clubgoers enter the 18th-century townhouse behind a guarded cordon; as drums beat and whistles are blown, activists belonging to the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) chase them with leaflets, yelling about the treatment of workers inside, while flustered police officers and security guards with faces like thunder stalk the trade unionists like cats. “It’s like the last days before the French Revolution,” one clubgoer tells me, somewhat wryly.

If you want an insight into Britain’s decadent social order, this is a good place to start. The club is so exclusive that apparently some billionaires don’t make the cut when they apply for membership. Exotic chandeliers, Parisian bohemian decor, luxurious dining rooms hung with exquisite art; it even has its own cigar shop. But while royals and Hollywood A-listers party, kitchen porters spend hours scrubbing pots and pans and cleaning kitchens on poverty pay. Until a campaign began, the porters were paid a derisory £8.65 an hour, nearly £2 below the London living wage – as set by the independent Living Wage Foundation – of £10.55 an hour. Under pressure, the club was forced to offer a 35p hike, but it is still far short. Lacking occupational sick pay, staff are paid nothing for the first three days of illness, and just £94.25 a week thereafter: ill workers with families to feed and rent to pay are often faced with no choice but to turn up to work regardless. As one kitchen porter tells me – a clause in his contract forbids him from speaking to the media without permission, so he must remain anonymous – “the wages we are paid are not enough for us to live in this country, even just to pay rent, which is very expensive”. He has children to feed, and the nine hours a day he works at the club isn’t enough, so he’s forced to take at a second job. “We don’t even have time to rest,” he says: they are allowed an unpaid 20-minute break, but even that can be impossible when the club is busy and dirty pots are piling up. He fears repercussions from management, and has considered leaving the job but is determined to fight “not just to improve working conditions, but improve the life of my family too”.

When the club recently outsourced its kitchen porters to ACT Clean – which has refused to comment – staff were threatened with dismissal if they didn’t sign a contract undermining already measly terms and conditions. Five resigned. But nearly half of the 19 kitchen porters joined the IWGB, which has played a critical role in organising migrant workers in particular in precarious work and is determined to fight outsourcing and win a genuine living wage, occupational sick pay and union recognition.

club tells me it is “proud that all of our employees, including our kitchen porters, are paid well above the government’s minimum wage and, indeed, well above the industry average” and that workers have “access to a range of other benefits” (none of which they specify). It accuses the IWGB of not bothering to seek recognition and of “hypocrisy” for not focusing on lower wages elsewhere, and says that the club conducts its “business in an entirely legal manner”. But the porters are no longer employees – the club has outsourced them. Yes, they are paid above the minimum wage, but this is well below the living wage; the union has sought recognition from ACT Clean, but 5 Hertford Street must pay the increased costs. Whatever the industry average is, and it is undoubtedly bad, the kitchen porters toil on wages this affluent club can afford to raise. “We have not suggested they are acting unlawfully,” the IWGB’s general secretary, Jason Moyer-Lee, says, “just immorally.”

The owner of this club is Robin Birley, a multimillionaire businessman who once championed the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet; he has long funded Eurosceptic causes, including donating large sums to U kip and the two official Leave campaigns in the referendum. He is now helping to bankroll Boris Johnson’s mission to become Tory leader. Here is a man who has used his vast wealth to back campaigns against freedom of movement which have vilified migrants as the source of Britain’s ills. Yet most of his exploited kitchen porters are Latin Americans with EU passports because they have dual Spanish or Portuguese citizenship. “It just highlights the hypocrisy of the whole Brexit movement,” says Moyer-Lee. “The Brexit xenophobia was sold to people with the idea that it was good for workers, but the root cause of exploitation and low pay is employers, not migrants. Robin Burley is no friend of workers.”

For years, media moguls and campaigns bankrolled by the rich have fed the lie that migrants are the cause of injustices propagated by the powerful: the failure to build housing, the strain on public services by cuts, the lack of secure jobs, the decline in real wages. This poison has sought to deflect blame from bosses like Birley who won’t pay wages on which workers can live. Far from undercutting wages, migrant workers are fighting to raise them. It is a story we have seen time and again, like the cleaners at the London School of Economics – many of them migrants – who won a struggleagainst outsourcing two years ago.

Quietly, below the radar, anti-migrant sentiment has been falling, despite continued migrant-bashing by the Tories and their media allies. Yet the case for migrants and freedom of movement has been sorely missing since the referendum result – even within Labour, despite the pro-migrant records of the party’s leading lights. As Labour pivots towards a remain posture, that must surely change. The saga of 5 Hertford Street is a microcosm, after all: migrants exploited to sustain the luxurious lifestyle of a shameless elite who blame migrants for injustices they themselves are responsible for. When the champagne is flowing, I wonder if the beneficiaries of our crumbling social order realise that a reckoning is surely overdue.

Source-https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/18/millionaires-migrants-mayfair-club-brexit

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