Hospitality worker

I’d like to take a punt and say most MPs haven’t worked in hospitality. Or any precarious job that means hours and pay can differ week to week. If they had, there’s no way the Employment Rights Bill would be as watered down as it is!

The so-called ban on zero-hour contracts and fire and rehire isn’t worth the paper its written on. The minimum wage might have increased, but what they give with one hand, they take with the other.

Cost of living

My council tax bill has gone up by 5%. My rent has gone up by another £50 a month. I’m not against big business paying more tax or even paying more employer National Insurance (NI). But everyone could see at the time when the government announced employers contributing more that they were going to pass it on to us.

And look what’s happened. I work for a big chain of pubs. And due to the NI increase, hours have been drastically cut. I know hospitality workers complain about that a lot – but the cuts in hours I’m seeing under this Labour government is nothing I’ve seen before, and my pub was open under Covid laws! Whole shifts have been struck off.

The company I work for is forking out an extra £60 million a year in NI. The business I work for can afford to pay it, but rather than reducing their profits they are attacking our pay. I hope hospitality workers wake up and smell the coffee. The only way we’re going to fight job losses is by organising and standing up to the government and the bosses.

Wetherspoons cuts hours and pay for thousands of kitchen staff

‘Suzie’, Wetherspoons worker

Wetherspoons pub chain is placing the load on workers – by cutting 30 minutes away from our opens and closes.

At 6am every morning, Wetherspoons kitchen openers clock in, and are immediately faced with a two-hour countdown until service begins. A grease-soaked canopy, cleaning behind every single appliance, prep work for the whole day, the list goes on.

With the new policy, their timer will start at 6:30 instead. Most likely this will cause prep work to stretch into food-service time – double the work, but the same pay.

Similarly, kitchen closers will have half an hour less before their close is considered ‘late’. This gives them a mere hour from when the service ends to clean the whole kitchen, top to bottom.

They cannot leave until the job is done. But too many late closes in a week mean being chewed out by head office, which creates pressure to rush the job. Again, less pay, less time, for the same work.

For kitchen staff like me this will mean, at best, turning equipment off early or not being able to let it cool down before cleaning it. At worst, there will be pressure to clock out early, resulting in stolen wages. It has happened to me before – five minutes here, ten minutes there, all to avoid the audit scores going down.

These changes are a punishment to the workers for ‘extra business costs’, brought on by the minimum wage and National Insurance increases. As workers, we cannot let Wetherspoons get away with this.

We must organise. We must demand an end to unreasonable expectations in our workplaces.

We are humans, not robots, and we deserve better!