From all over the UK I am picking up stories of employees – or more often the activists who claim to represent them – cosplaying as revolutionaries. Strikers go for progressive business owners rather than the standard capitalist bogeymen, because they are softer targets. They force them to close and then attempt to take control in the name of workers’ power.
They are living a fantasy. For the workers never do hijack companies. They just lose their jobs. The owners lose their businesses. The customers lose a service. Everyone loses.
The closures teach a lesson that being a nice, caring liberal whose sole wish is to plan a menu around vegan pasta sauces, is not the passport to a quiet life it once was.
I first heard about business hijacking when contacts in Glasgow called me in 2023 about the fate of the Saramago cafe bar at the city’s Centre for Contemporary Arts. As the Tripadvisor reviews showed, people liked it. It was a cut above most of the venues on Sauchiehall Street. There were menus for vegetarians and vegans, and DJs as the night wore on.
One evening, a small group of staff members shut the cafe down. They said they wanted better staffing levels, but the owners said their demands had already been met, and fired them for their ‘unannounced’ strike in breach of their contract.
Their union, the Industrial Workers of the World, responded by demanding the reinstatement of the sacked workers – as unions have always done. There were pickets, and social media demands to boycott Saramago – nothing unusual there, either.
But then the normal restrictions on union action broke down. The campaign became so intense the Centre for Contemporary Arts closed the café because the dispute was putting the ‘arts programme and the wellbeing of our staff’ in danger.
The small group staff who had precipitated the action submitted a bid to reopen the café as a workers’ cooperative. But you need capital, licences and contracts with suppliers to run a catering operation and nothing came of it. Commercial operators weren’t interested either. Despite inducements from the centre’s management, they backed away for fear that they would receive the same treatment as Saramago.
The people who contacted me from the Centre for Contemporary Arts were appalled. The café owners were not exploitative bosses, they said, but nice people who paid decent wages and had been around the Glasgow music scene for years. They could not understand where all the aggro had come from.
I do, or at least I have a working theory.
Journalists at the Guardian and Observer still remember the story told by Phillip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian’s great post-war critic. He recalled the despairing cry from his father when he told him he had found a job with the Guardian, ‘my dear boy, never work for a liberal newspaper they will sack you on Christmas Eve.’
The argument goes that because liberal companies, charities and campaign groups think themselves virtuous, they treat their workers abysmally and expect them to put up with it in the name of the greater good.
I have seen that happen. But in truth businesses that profess to be left wing are more likely to be vulnerable to assault from the left than standard capitalist enterprises. They can be more easily shamed on social media as hypocrites who refuse to live up to their values. Activists can target their leftish customers, as happened to Saramago, and persuade them to go elsewhere
In other words, it’s easier to destroy a community, vegan-friendly café than McDonald’s.
In 2023, I did not know what to do with the story. I had never heard of union activists destroying a business before. Negotiators are normally very careful not to risk putting their members out of work. This is just a freak occurrence, I thought. How wrong I was.
To stay in Glasgow, the Centre for Contemporary Arts is now closed. It’s not just the café that is gone, everything is closed. A group calling itself Art Workers for Palestine Scotland demanded last month that the centre boycott Israel. The board said it wasn’t sure it could because of its duty to be politically impartial. A protest was planned. The management locked the doors, and for the time being Glasgow has not just lost a café but an arts centre, too, not because of funding cuts demanded by evil politicians, but because of the demands of activists.
How much longer arts bureaucrats can ask taxpayers to fund this shambolic centre is now a live question.
The city also had a music venue called 13th Note, which promoted new acts. Unite organised a strike in 2023 over working conditions and pay. Once again, the venue closed. Once again, there was an attempt to reopen it as a workers’ cooperative and once again that failed too. I am not saying the workers didn’t have a case. But by the end of the dispute, they didn’t have a job.
Meanwhile the current issue of the Londoner carries the grimly comic story of Scarlett Letters, named after its owner Marin Scarlett. Until a few weeks ago, it was a radical, queer independent bookshop in Bethnal Green, east London.
As the authors Andrew Kersley and Jack Walton tell it, trouble began with the shop’s disabled toilet, which, inexplicably, was installed in an inaccessible basement. Marin Scarlett told staff: ‘We have had an issue over the last few weeks of people just letting themselves downstairs to use the toilet.’
In future, staff were to personally escort anyone who asked to use the loo to ensure they didn’t steal stock. The problem as she saw it was that her staff were simply too kind, too feminine, too British to refuse to allow access to random strangers wandering in off the street.
‘You are all extremely nice, assigned female at birth, in customer service, mostly British etc., and all of this sometimes doesn’t lend itself to “no”.’
As if to prove her wrong, the staff condemned her message as ‘bizarre and sexist’. They unionised and demanded secure contracts and cooperative control of the store.
‘The workers are queer, trans, racialised, disabled, sex workers and students,’ they said in a statement. ‘Their identities have been used to advertise and fundraise for the bookshop as a radical space whilst their voices are not listened to.’
Marin Scarlett improved sick pay, but pointed out that her shop did not make a profit and relied on the generosity of an anonymous backer. It couldn’t carry on with this level of disruption and had to close.
Scarlett was clearly mortified at being treated as an oppressive boss rather than an ally: ‘The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.’
Her sacked employees weren’t finished, however. They occupied the building and demanded that she give them the stock so they could start a new bookshop on their own. Scarlett had to round up friends and organise a nighttime raid to pack up the books and take back control of her property. As her team tooled up, and a locksmith stood ready to change the locks, I wonder if she ever imagined that running a queer bookshop would end like this.
The left is always torn by arguments between reformists and revolutionaries, and nowhere more so than now. The threat that Trump, Farage and their kind pose to liberal democracy can make people argue that you must move to the centre and do everything you can to woo waverers.
It’s not a shabby argument. To my mind it is obvious that the US Democrats need to junk woke ideology if they are ever to save the American republic.
But doubling down is an equally human reaction to hard times. You can see it in the enthusiasm in the US for the left-wing mayoral candidate in New York Zohran Mamdani.Or in the UK you can look at resident doctors who still went on strike despite their pay increasing by 28.9 per cent across the last three years.
And you can see it too in the ferocity with which workers in progressive businesses turn on their employers, and in how little they care that they may end up destroying themselves as they attempt to destroy their bosses.
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