wage theft

On Monday January 26th, members of Manchester SF picketed outside Manpower's office in Manchester city centre in solidarity with Amazon workers (many of them hired by Manpower) in Poland. A week of action has been called by the ZSP, Polish section of the International Workers Association, who are organising among these workers. For details of the dispute see below.

This Manpower office is above a hairdressing salon, on the 1st floor of a building shared by a number of companies, and is therefore not very visible from street level. Despite this, and after handing in our information leaflet at Manpower's reception, our presence ruffled the feathers of management inside, who tried to have us moved on by the building managers. Of course, we stayed put and ignored the usual claims that we were creating a health & safety hazard / trespassing on private property / embarrassing Manpower management [delete as appropriate].

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Brighton Solfed's campaign in the hospitality sector finishes the year with success in two further cases. In the first, a worker from an Italian restaurant took on his former bosses for their bullying and stealing part of his wages. In the second case, an agency worker had not been paid all of her holiday pay. Find out how the two workers fared with Solfed support.

This summer, Brighton Hospitality Workers (BHW) took on one of the most uncompromising bosses we have faced. The owner (who shall henceforth be referred to as ‘V’) of a well-known local café had hired a worker with an agreement to pay her £6ph but when it came to payday, he only coughed up what amounted to £5ph and refused to pay her holiday pay. After V refused to pay her the remainder, the worker approached BHW, who agreed to support her in getting back her owed wages.

During the initial meeting with V, BHW delivered a letter outlining reasons for the conflict and the demands of the worker. The worker herself was too scared to face V. V was verbally and physically abusive, and refused to accept the letter (we left it on the premises anyway).

Elena has received her remaining wages! Thank you to everyone involved.

Elena left her job at Green Eco Plus in February as she wasn’t being paid. She managed, through her persistence and some help from friends and Solfed, to get back an initial £300 over a couple of months. After this the director of the company (Chris Rose AKA Kyriacos Pitsillos) told Elena that the company was liquidated (it wasn’t) and he wouldn’t pay the remaining £250.

July 10 public sector strike, stolen wage disputes at a restaurant and a greengrocer, and holiay pay.

After a short but intense campaign, Marta, a receptionist at the Speak Up London language school, has won a week’s unpaid wages and a glowing reference.

Marta was sacked without reason and without the required one week’s notice.  She got in contact with Solidarity Federation who quickly organised over a dozen people to March into the bosses’ office with a letter demanding she be given a week’s pay in lieu of notice and a positive reference.

After Speak Up failed to respond to Marta’s letter, SolFed and other supportive individuals and organisations organised a massive blockade of the Speak Up Facebook page.  Hundreds of post appeared within the 45 minutes. An hour and half into the action, Speak Up shut down their Facebook page entirely to all UK users.

The next day SolFed received an email from the bosses at Speak Up: they were paying up.  It contained a copy of Marta’s final payslip alongside a copy of a positive reference letter.