We have concluded our dispute with Fox & Sons after a second landlord quit the agency following a short direct action campaign against their business. This follows another landlord who quit the agency in February after a similar campaign. Our campaign against Fox & Sons has been ongoing for four and a half months, and the loss of these landlords – from whom Fox & Sons would have taken 16% of the rent for a full management service, on top of all the fees they charge – coupled to the damage to their business caused by the campaign, is likely to have cost them thousands of pounds.

Brighton Solidarity Federation has opened a public campaign against The Sidewinder on Upper St James in Kemp Town. We were approached by a worker who was immediately dismissed just for calling in sick for one shift. The worker was also owed unpaid holiday entitlement.

We wrote to The Sidewinder asking that they pay compensation for unfair dismissal and fork out the owed holiday pay.  They have now paid the holiday pay, but have refused demands for compensation, accusing us of blackmail. Clearly, The Sidewinder thinks that not providing employees with contracts, holiday pay, failing to follow grievence procedures and dismissing workers for being ill is acceptable.

Brighton Solfed are bored of these types of shenanigans from the bosses: pub workers need to stand together in the face of terrible working conditions and illegal employment practices. We stand in solidarity with workers and will not stop until we receive what the worker deserves.

In 2018 Mencap, the learning disability charity with an unappealing name, took the government to court. Mencap wanted to challenge an earlier ruling on whether or not sleep shifts count as work, for the purposes of calculating the national minimum wage. They won their case and now, thanks to them, sleep shifts are no longer legally recognised as work. So if you sleep as part of your job, your boss doesn’t have to pay you for it.

I am lucky; I haven’t worked a sleep shift for years — they do not involve a lot of actual sleep. In my old job in a dementia unit I would work a late shift from 3pm-10pm, at 6am I would start getting residents washed and dressed, and between 10pm and 6am I was nominally “asleep” and therefore not getting paid. Even if I was getting paid, this would still be a breach of Working Time Regulations (something that most care workers opt out of when we sign our contracts).

In late October 2018, we organised with a student tenant who was being messed around with a disrepair issue by a well-known student lettings agency. We’d beaten this agency before via a direct-action campaign – this time all it took was the delivery of a demand letter to get this tenant compensation. Below, the tenants tells the story of the dispute.

One of our toilets was out of action for the best part of six months. If used, faeces would back up and overflow out of the toilet. This plumbing damage was caused by a fire that wasn’t disclosed to us. Although we had use of another toilet, the toilet that was overflowing was directly next door to the kitchen that meant alongside being inconvenienced, it was quite a disgusting and hazardous living situation prior to calling the plumbers to fix it.

Care workers employed by care provider Alternative Futures Group (AFG) have recently voted on industrial action in a Unison organised ballot over the long-running, sleep-in dispute. Ballots have now been counted, and 87.4% voted to strike on a 51.5% turnout.

Unison has also recently sent out consultative ballots to members of another large care provider, Lifeways Group. The long running exploitation and financial abuse of workers in the care sector by their employers is finally starting to get attention, and care workers are saying “enough is enough”.

The sleep-in dispute has been going on for some years and revolves around sleep-in shifts, where a care worker will stay overnight at work in a person’s home or in a care home, in case they are needed in the night. Typically, they will sleep in an office or spare room, and be available to work whenever called on.

It’s been a good week in our dispute with Fox & Sons. On Wednesday we picketed the business of a landlord who rents a property out through Fox & Sons; by Thursday she had dropped them as her letting agent. We’d written to this landlord one week previously, explaining Fox & Sons’ systematic mistreatment of their tenants, and demanded that she either drop them as her agency or speak to them and tell them to pay compensation to the tenants involved in our ongoing dispute with them. This landlord chose to do neither, so we staged a picket outside her business on Wednesday 6th February, informing passers by about her association with Fox & Sons.

Last Saturday, the Solidarity Federation organised its first women oriented workplace organiser training course. The training is based on the SolFed’s general workplace organiser training course, but adapted to concentrate on the issues and problems faced by women in the workplace.

The training focuses on direct action, rather than offering a legalistic approach to workplace organising, the aim being to set out how women can come together and organise their own action to improve their lives. Particular attention is paid in the course to the impact the women's role within the home has on their working lives, an area largely ignored by the traditional unions.

We see the course very much in its early stages, as the intention is to develop the course by drawing on the experiences of the women attending and incorporating them, so the training course is constantly evolving.

We recently had another success against more shoddy employment practice. A well renowned central Brighton pub had not paid one of its workers any holiday entitlement and not provided payslips that matched the working hours completed. Unfortunately for them, their worker is a friend of Brighton SolFed and knew they were being stitched up.

Management were initially dismissive. They did think they might owe the worker an extra days pay, but we reminded them it was quite considerably higher. After a detailed demand letter was sent, the establishment paid their dues within the deadline. However, we still await the missing paperwork, so watch this space.

In the meantime, remember paid annual leave is a legal right that an employer has to provide, which is accrued as soon as you start working. If in doubt, talk to your colleagues, and Brighton SolFed will have your back!

As our public campaign against Fox & Sons continues, and as they continue to refuse to compensate the six tenants they left homeless due to persistent failures of communication and procedure, we have been contacted by another tenant describing their experience of attempting to rent through the agency.

The tenant (who has asked to remain anonymous) became aware of our dispute with Fox & Sons, and shared their story in order to show that the issues faced by the six tenants organising with Brighton Solidarity Federation are not isolated but instead suggest a consistent pattern of neglect and failure on the part of the agency.

Patrick, a tenant we have been organising with for the past year, is facing homelessness after disgraceful treatment by Brighton Council, who have systematically failed to carry out their most basic duties, leaving Patrick with no protection against eviction by his landlord. For details of the history of this case see here: http://www.brightonsolfed.org.uk/brighton/the-arrogance-continues-and-so-does-our-fight-youngs-dispute-update-25112018