A CENTURY ago, the city of Glasgow was convulsed in a sustained period of militant industrial activity; a formative and defining epoch for the Glaswegian working class which came to be known as Red Clydeside. Within the commotion of this period, and perhaps a century premature, a group of women working for Kerr’s Cafes, under the banner of the National Federation of Women Workers, undertook the first hospitality strike in British history. Their organiser, Agnes Adam, put their demands simply: “It’s a living wage they want.”

A century on, Unite Hospitality Glasgow (UHG) members on either side of the River Clyde gear up to fight for the same. Buoyed by a historic victory in the first hotel strike since 1979 last summer, workers at the Village Hotel and Vue Cinema are preparing to take industrial action for the Real Living Wage, trade union recognition and, in the case of the latter, an end to zero-hours contracts (the former having achieved this in July).

Not unlike the Kerr’s Cafe strikers, our members work in the shadows of economic and political crises. Following the 2008 Great Recession, a flurry of publications from the IMF and World Bank advocated for what was euphemistically dubbed “labour market flexibility.” Despite the seductive headline, the guts of this research identified collective bargaining, employment legislation, job security, and employee benefits as obstructions to “job creation” in the post-2008 economy.

The restructure of employment relations which followed has come to characterise hospitality: low-pay, insecure tenure, the near-absence of workplace rights or enforceable health and safety regulations, and a vicious hostility towards trade unionism. It has made our labour responsive to supply and demand, and imposed an unprecedented level of economic and employment precarity on workers across Britain.

The contemporary significance of the hospitality industry in the British economy has its roots in the barren wastes of our deindustrialised heartlands. It has been an important feature in sustaining the delusion of capitalist growth in the post-industrial era — a facade which was shattered in 2008.

Unlike a century ago, capital has been able to offset the pressure of anaemic growth and geopolitical competition by devouring what is left of the post-war consensus, squeezing profit out of our class through the evaporation of the benefits won in the decades following Red Clydeside.

Our members are now stationed on this frontier: their immediate task is to push back on the very worst excesses of labour market “flexibility.” The meek offerings of Labour’s Employment Rights Bill is evidence enough that nobody is coming to save us.

It would be easy to simply protest against this; to bemoan the cowardice of the Starmer government for disgracing the name of Labour; to sit back and despair at the injustice of it all. Indeed, this has been the modus operandi of many sections of the left for decades, paralysed by the defeat at the hands of Thatcher.

What sets these workers apart is a renewed determination to utilise the only real leverage they’ve got — their collective control over the creation of profit — to fight back. Perhaps their youth — the average age of the bargaining units is 19 and 22 respectively — has insulated them from the defeatist culture which has permeated much of our movement.

Our industry has long been neglected by the trade union movement. As recently as 2023, I have sat in trade union meetings where it was described as “unorganisable” and our critical importance to the contemporary economy overlooked.

In the intervening period, UHG members have achieved recognition agreements at The Stand Comedy Club and Glasgow Film Theatre, undertaken the first bar strike in Scotland this century at the 13th Note, developed and propagated an industrial strategy for Palestine, and achieved a landmark victory at Village Hotels in July. To my knowledge, we are also the only trade union branch in Britain to have taken industrial action for Palestine.

Scattered throughout these achievements, admittedly, are sore and costly defeats. The precarity of our industry fosters high-turnover, worker apathy, financial vulnerability, and a pervasive anxiety. Such is the nature of movement-building: from every wreckage we try to identify and exploit the opportunity to learn. It would be easy to forget that these same issues afflicted the founders of our movement — those whose innovative courage can be credited with replacing child labour with universal education, building mass council housing, and the establishment of the NHS.

While the Kerr’s Cafe workers played a modest role in a momentous era, our strikes this Christmas serve to pioneer a renewed industrial strategy. Where the first Village victory cracked the ice, this double-whammy has the potential to obliterate barriers on industrial activity in a sector of increasing importance to the Scottish economy.

One of the heroes of Red Clydeside, Willie Gallacher — whose portrait, alongside Agnes Adam, is stitched on our new branch banner — once said that “conduct is of far greater importance than professions of faith.” It is in this vein that UHG members will take to the picket lines this December, to leverage their indispensable role in the creation of profit and deal a blow for a better tomorrow, rather than talk about it.

For Christmas? It’s a living wage they want.

Nick Troy is the chair of the Glasgow branch and National Combine of Unite Hospitality.