Members of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union are taking strike action at Kingsmill bakeries this week. Ian Hodson explains why

Tomorrow, Saturday 3rd June will see our members at Kingsmill bakeries return to the picket line for a 48-hour stoppage starting at 7am. ABF claim to understand the value of good people, strong and accountable teams, the power of brands, the need for continuous investment and the need to maintain strong and enduring relationships with customers and suppliers. On the picket line this week, a worker told us that a senior manager had once said, “If you’re not happy with your hourly rate you know where the gate is.”

Some of the management are failing to understand how we are struggling and how low morale is. It doesn’t feel they have any understanding of us as people – in fact we are treated more as a number than as a person.

Management say that across all their businesses, they live and breathe their values through the work they do every day, from investing in the health and safety of colleagues to promoting diversity and respecting human rights. Our values, they say,  are respecting everyone’s dignity; acting with integrity; progressing through collaboration; and delivering with rigour.

Yet workers are telling us of the lack of empathy they receive when a family member dies, with cuts to bereavement leave and the attacks on their terms and conditions. They also want to cut breaks to fund a below-inflation pay offer which we feel flies in the face of health and safety requirements.

“For us it shows their actual values are to squeeze us, their loyal workforce who, despite having a mandate at the outbreak of Covid to take strike action, decided to feed the nation and support the call to pull together. Yet now the reward from our employer is a derisory pay offer they don’t seem to value us,” commented a striking worker.

They suggest they pride themselves on being a first-class employer. As a result, employees tend to stay with us for a long time is how they put it on their website, building exciting careers that help them fulfil their goals at work, at home and in the community. Workers earning less than the current living wage would suggest that’s not the case. In fact, the failure to provide decent pay also has a knock-on effect on spending power in our community.

They say they believe that most people are inherently good and that with encouragement, engagement, and support, they will do the right thing in the right way. According to them, high standards of integrity enable them to drive a strong culture, recognising that acting responsibly is the only way to build and manage a business over the long term.

The collapse of morale at the Liverpool site strongly suggests that they do not in reality adhere to whatever values they claim on their website.. Their inability to recruit through the recent high turnover in staff indicates that they are far from being a first-class employer: they are an exploitative employer that even fails to meet the current living wage of £10.42 when their current payments are deconstructed.

The workforce has been shocked to find out it’s based on an hourly rate of £8.08 and £8.65. Our recent food report showed that 17.5% of workers across the sector now use foodbanks, an increase of 10%. Meanwhile, ABF boasts about a profit of £1.435 million, while many in its workforce need universal credit to try and scrape by.

Ian Hodson is National President of the BFAWU.

Image: BFAWU.