GMB: playing chicken with pubcos
The GMB union held a meeting for disaffected pub tenants across the road from the Morning Advertiser's offices in Crawley last week. Three members of the editorial team, including myself, went along to listen.
The GMB is holding a series of roadshows for pub tenants, in the lead-up to holding a ballot on taking industrial action. The Crawley meeting was attended by 15 or so pub tenants with GMB regional officer Paul Maloney hosting the event.
Maloney started with a potted history of the rise of the large tenanted pub companies couched in the rhetoric of 1980s Scargillism.
As a piece of rabble-rousing it was exemplary, but as a piece of historical accuracy — less so. He was on safer ground when he began to talk about the pressures many tenants felt under.
Not surprisingly, his audience were responsive to the talk of unsustainable rents and prices, with Maloney slamming into "bourgeois" MPs and referring to pub company bosses in industrial language.
There are plenty of people who pat the GMB on the back for speaking up for tenants in highlighting injustices. There's no doubt the pub sector is providing a fertile recruitment area. Plans for possible industrial action are an upping of the ante, alongside a series of publicity stunts such as organising for 100 fiddlers to play outside Brulines' Stockton headquarters.
Should licensees vote in favour of industrial action, the GMB is proposing a mass turn-off of Brulines and other action. The major problem is that the law seems to require an employee and an employer for this to qualify as a "trade dispute", which is not applicable to the world of pub companies and self-employed licensees.
Pressed on this, Maloney simply challenged the pubcos to take the GMB to court. "I don't give a s*** whether this is legal or not," Maloney told the meeting. There was no reassurance over the lawfulness of its action other than that his own legal department had not stopped him.
Maloney suggested large pub companies wouldn't want to brave the court of public opinion by taking a tenant to court for breach of contract should the forthcoming ballot lead to "industrial action". There was the suggestion from Maloney that the legal wheels would take weeks and weeks to hold tenants accountable — and in the meantime the walls of the big pubcos would start to crumble.
What would placate the GMB? Only an immediate £12,000 reduction in rent at every pub (a number it claims to have taken from the OFT report, although the editorial team here can find no reference to it).
The GMB knows there is no basis in law for its industrial action. Nevertheless, it's suggesting down-trodden licensees should link arms and play chicken with the pubcos. This is either cynically cavalier or high-stakes brinkmanship.
