FOOD FOR THOUGHT

During the summer, at the height of the holiday season, British Airways workers at Heathrow went on strike. Although BA was not directly involved, it had contracted out many of its services to save money and increase profits. Supplying what passes for food to BA’s aeroplanes is just one service among many which have been snapped up by wealthy capitalists looking for quick profits. And profits are what drives Gate Gourmet.

Gate Gourmet, the US multinational, has a virtual monopoly on supplying airline food in the US and Europe. Like all employers, it wants to reduce costs and make as much money from its workers as possible. One cost is its wages and salaries bill. The company wanted workers to accept lower starting salaries and some redundancies, and those who remained to work harder. This is par for the course in capitalist concerns, and is mimicked in the state sector from the NHS to local authorities.

The motive of capitalist production is profit. The way capitalists try to increase profits is to increase the unpaid element of the working day in relation to the paid working day, to increase the surplus product in relation to the product necessary for the workers’ means of subsistence. Capitalists, as Marx showed, have to try to increase what he called the rate of surplus value.

To do this, capitalists have several techniques at their disposal.

The first is speeding up the work through fixing the workforce in a conveyor belt system where each operation is dictated by the process of production. At a paint factory, for example, workers fill the pots with paint as they pass through a grinder. If the paint passes through the grinder quicker than before and the same worker fills an extra dozen of pots within the same time, his productivity has increased. The same applies to car manufacture and other assembly-line production. From the capitalists’ point of view, increased productivity means an increased rate of exploitation and, other things being equal, this should spell increased profits.

Another technique is to improve working conditions, use of profit-sharing, company pensions, bonuses and other perks to retain a workforce or to give them the incentive to work harder. Psychologists noted that improving the lighting of an office increased productivity. Industrial psychologists have introduced into companies other strategies to give the impression that workers have a “stake” in the organisation and so induce them to work harder. The management theory of “empowerment” is a more recent example.

In other words, the capitalist may increase the unpaid labour either by lengthening the working day – many workers now routinely work through their lunch period – or by increasing the intensity of work by making workers work harder for the same pay. For instance, BA and other airlines have reduced the number of cabin crew on each plane, although the same number of passengers have to be supplied with meals and drinks, etc. This means that each member of the crew must do more work in the same amount of time, and for the same – or less – pay. Both methods increase the rate of exploitation by generating more surplus value.

Another technique is to drive wages down for the same amount of work or for additional work. If a team of five workers were told that two were to be sacked, while the remaining three not only worked for less pay but did the work once done by five workers, this would increase the profit going to the capitalist. “Restructuring”, as it is called. It has also been called “sweating the assets”, and taken to extremes the result is a sweatshop.
The technique adopted by the employers at Gate Gourmet was a variation on the latter technique of increasing profits. They found a pool of six hundred ‘agency’ workers who would do the work en masse at less than the wages of the current workforce and also under worse conditions. The company engineered a strike so that the current workforce could be sacked, which meant the company could avoid paying redundancy money, and then the company could hire the cheaper pool of labour. The trick did not quite work since other workers, BA baggage handlers and check-in staff, many of them related to the Gate Gourmet workers, came out in an unofficial strike in support of the catering workers.

So what of the capitalist who owns Gate Gourmet? Step forward David Bonderman, whose business empire owns the company. He has an estimated fortune of $6bn. The investment company he founded in 1993, Texas Pacific, has assets of about $15bn. Bonderman is also the chairman of the cheap airline, Ryan Air: like other cheap airlines, this would stand to profit from BA losing passengers, especially at a time when with the loss of passengers flying to London after due to the July terrorist bombs, in addition to higher costs due to the ever-rising price of oil, BA has been increasingly in difficulties.

For Mr Bonderman’s 60th birthday he spent a cool $10 million at the Bellagio, one of Las Vegas’s most opulent casinos, where the comedian Robin Williams gave him a stand-up routine over dinner. Their guests were treated to a private concert by the Rolling Stones. This has its irony. In 1968 the Rolling Stones sang “Street Fighting Man” celebrating “the sound of marching, charging feet” around Grosvenor Square as the capitalist Left battled it out with the police.

Mick Jagger incredibly sang at the time “But what can a poor boy do except to sing for a rock ’n roll band”. When Sir Mick sang to David Bonderman, it was not a “poor boy” who was singing for his supper, and it was certainly not a poor man who was listening through a haze of smouldering birthday candles.

“But what can a poor boy do”? Workers at Heathrow Airport thought that striking would help but they were summarily sacked. Even if they get their jobs back, they will remain poor and exploited. Nor will joining a rock ’n roll band help. Sir Mick is an exception to the rule. Most rock musicians, if they survive their twenties, remain poor, bodily crippled and mentally exhausted.

Marx said workers should look at capitalism with a sober disposition. His conclusion was that because capitalism can never be made to work in the interest of the working class they should consciously and politically abolish it. This meant becoming Socialists.

As a socialist you will not become a “street fighting man” but instead someone who thinks for themselves, someone who concludes that a Socialist revolution is the only solution to class exploitation. Common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society will put an end to parasites like David Bonderman. A growing Socialist movement should have Bonderman choking on his next piece of birthday cake.

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