compensation

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 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.

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.

Brighton SolFed’s public campaign against Fox & Sons has now been extended to their parent company, Skipton Building Society. With Fox & Sons still refusing to compensate the six tenants whose tenancy they cancelled five days after it was supposed to start, leaving them with nowhere to live, we contacted David Cutter, the chief executive of Skipton, and Gary Morton of their lettings branch Connells, to demand that they resolve the issue. Both Mr Cutter and Mr Morton refused to do so, meaning that we are today (Saturday 19th January) extending our campaign to pickets of Skipton branches across the country. This follows an initial picket of Skipton by Manchester SolFed last Saturday 12th January.

Our public dispute with Fox & Sons has continued into the new year, with the agency still failing to adequately compensate six former tenants who they left homeless five days after their tenancy was supposed to start. This failure has been made starker through the revelation that Fox & Sons demanded £720 compensation from the property company, Jears Properties Limited, that own the house the tenants were to move in to.

We recently opened a public dispute against multi-branch letting agency Fox & Sons, in support of a group of tenants who had their tenancy delayed and then completely withdrawn five days after the start of their agreed move-in date. As a result of this mismanagement by the agency, the tenants had to find a last minute alternative accommodation, which ended up being far above their budget. The tenants are now demanding that the agency pays them compensation to cover at least part of the additional costs that their new tenancy requires for an initial period. This would be a way for Fox & Sons to make up for the difficult financial situation that the tenants were forced into.