Holyhead worker victimised for speaking his own language

Taken from the Socialist Party Wales wesbite (www.socialistpartywales.org.uk)

A Bangor Socialist Party member

The front page of the North Wales Daily Post on May Day splashed a story of a worker at the Holyhead Morrisons store who had felt compelled to quit his job after being told not to speak Welsh. The last straw was when he asked another worker in Welsh to move some items into the store warehouse, when the store manager (who only speaks English) was passing by. The manager asked him not to speak in Welsh as he thought the workers might be talking about him. According to a Morrisons spokesperson the worker was having a conversation with the manager when the incident occurred. On the face of it, this amounts to bullying a worker into speaking a particular language.
The 2001 census showed that over 20% of the population of Wales spoke Welsh, but this increases dramatically in North West Wales, with 69% and 60% speaking Welsh in Gwynedd and Anglesey respectively. This means that Welsh is the first language of a sizeable proportion of workers in the area. Indeed in the quarry industry, which 100 years ago was the area’s main industry, the North Wales Quarrymens Union conducted all its business in Welsh. Moreover, being forced not to speak Welsh has echoes of the period of the emergence of capitalism in Wales which saw English bosses ban workers from speaking the language in order to maintain their dominance, and children who only spoke Welsh at home forced to speak and study in English at school.
In the present case, the worker's trade union, USDAW, did not initially take this issue up, although they are now investigating it. That was left to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (The Welsh Language Society) who have organised a picket outside the store to demand the right to work through the medium of Welsh. They have raised the need for the Welsh Assembly to have legislative powers over the Welsh language which should include the right to work through the medium of Welsh. Whilst this is undoubtedly correct, it doesn't go far enough.
Under capitalist society there are plenty of rights on paper, yet often the bosses can ignore them when it suits their needs. Workers have always had to fight for their rights, such as the right to vote or the right to belong to a trade union, which have been fought for. In reality, only workers organised via the trades union movement can guarantee those rights. Workers should have the right to communicate with people in any language that the person they are talking to is comfortable talking in. They shouldn't be bullied into speaking into any particular language just because a manager wishes to pry on their conversation

Vote Robbie Segal for USDAW President!

Note: A report of the Bangor Gaza protest will appear sometime tomorrow on this blog. It was a good protest, and from what I've heard so were ones elsewhere.

The ballot opens for the USDAW President and Executive Committee elections on Monday 19th January. Robbie Segal will be standing for the post of President but also for re-election to her current Executive Committee position. I'd like to encourage all members of USDAW to vote for her. To give people a flavour of her campaign I've posted links to a few things below

Stop Job Cuts (Article from this weeks The Socialist on USDAW elections)
No festive joy for shop workers (Article from previous weeks The Socialist on unionising at a warehouse)
Christmas is Over and the Cutbacks Begin (Article on cutbacks at Morrisons from the Activist blog)
The Activist Issue 13 (Newsletter of Socialist Party members and supporters in USDAW featuring New Years greetings from Robbie)

Report From USDAW Distribution Conference

As you may know I've been plugging the election campaign of Robbie Segal in USDAW for the general secretary's post. As part of the campaign - a blog (http://www.robbiesegal.blogspot.com/) and a website (http://www.robbiesegal.com/) have been setup with quite a lot of interesting pieces on them. Below I reprint one of them, a report from USDAW Distribution Conference.

I would like to thank Robbie Segal and anyone else that was instrumental in organising this long overdue conference specifically designed for the Distribution sector of the union.
The conference went well with lots of good feedback and ideas on how to progress and I look forward to further such conferences.

I believe the Distribution sector is a completely different animal to retail,with totally different needs when it comes to support from our union, and I will give just a few examples.

In retail, take Tesco for example their terms and conditions are negotiated at a national level by an USDAW national officer, in distribution we negotiate our own locally and only involve our national officer if agreement cannot be reached., therefore I believe we should be training our full time convenors in distribution in the art of negotiations,

In Sainsbury distribution centres we have an agreement that the union will spend time with new starters during their induction with a recommendation from the company that they join,my point being that whilst I understand that new members are the lifeblood of our union,we already have this important task covered and enjoy membership in excess of 90%,
I think the limited time spent when new stewards go on their introduction courses would be greatly enhanced by such exercises as role play in representing members in a disciplinary situation,health and safety regulations,and employment law rather than the present, recruitment,recruitment,recruitment, and on this point I think that as much effort should be placed on retaining current members as we do recruiting new ones, and we will only be able to do this by giving them the support and value they are seeking from well trained representatives.

I also believe that some guidance should be given from the union as to agreements we should be seeking,an example of such is a model of an enhanced redundancy package, easier to get an agreement during times when the company do not believe they will ever make redundancies yet almost impossible if redundancies becomes a reality.

I hope now that we will go forward with a true recognition as to the needs of the distribution sector and not be looked upon as the poor cousins in a retail union, which has been the perception for too long amongst many of our members.

Jon Harriss (Convenor Sainsbury`s Distribution Depot Waltham Point) C28

Notes of a Shop Worker

This is a letter that appeared in last weeks The Socialist. Part of the reason why I'm posting it is that it gives me the opportunity to plug The Activist (blog of Socialist Party members in USDAW - see links) and the new Robbie Segal for General Secretary blog www.robbiesegal.blogspot.com - the articles on both a pretty good.

I haven't been in my job all that long, but you can feel the discontent amongst the people I work with. Their main complaint is understaffing – there are never enough people working to do the job properly – which stresses us all out. In my department we cook and serve food, and the company has not too long ago launched a big drive on food hygiene. The problem being that all this training is rendered meaningless by the understaffing which means we can’t properly carry out all we’ve learnt. The company say that the understaffing is due to their high staff turnover, but of course this is the case when they only pay us the pitiful minimum wage and expect us to do so much. That said, even if they had more staff, we’d still be understaffed as that way they can squeeze more profit out of us.
Instead, what we need is the nationalisation of the major supermarket chains under the control of the workers so we can implement humane working conditions with a better wage that would benefit staff and customers alike.

USDAW & Me

For the second time in my life I've rejoined USDAW. And certainly this time I joined the blurb from union officials about why you should joinwas much better. We were told tales about how the union defended people at disciplinaries and how that was why we should join the union - 6 out of 7 of us new recruits joined. This was much better than when I joined last time - when the rep was talking to a load of 17/18 year olds that they should join USDAW for the free will writing service! I only joined after I managed to get it out of the rep that the union negotiated wage increases.

But that is the key thing really, the person who came to speak to us the other day was boasting of the unions partnership with the bosses and boasted of getting a 4% wage increase - to £5.52 an hour - the minimum wage! With fuel, food and the prices of just about everything else going up - a decent minimum wage of at £6.50 an hour if not more which some of the main unions demand will become more and more necessary.