In this issue of Notes from Below, we focus on the hospitality industry in Britain. The pieces that follow each present inquiries into different aspects of hospitality work. On the editorial board, we have had experiences organising in hospitality, and we look here to other experiments in hospitality organising for inspiration. As long as we have been involved in worker organising, the prospect of organising the hospitality sector has been contested. Hospitality sits within a group of sectors that are considered by the union establishment to be “unorganisable.” This issue shows this is not the case.

The realities of organising in hospitality, however, also show that the old tools of the trade union movement are not of much use here. All the experiments workers reflect on here succeed and all fail in their own ways. We have seen clear successes with workplace organising, although there have also been plenty of failed attempts. Workers have experimented with more creative ways to build campaigns, organising in communities, as well as trying to start cooperatives following closures. In each of the pieces that follow, the writers reflect on different successes, challenges, and ways forward for organising in the industry.

In Post-mortem of a piss-up in a brewery, Amardeep Singh Dhillon discusses the formation, successes, and decline of the South London Bartenders Network (SLBN), into the network’s focus on worker-led organising inside and outside of unions, abolitionist politics, and the casework trap. It argues that hospitality workers can achieve significant gains through localised, self-directed efforts, despite the transience of the job.

In The Afters: Building a Hospitality Workers’ Movement in Glasgow, we sit down with two organisers from struggles at Saramago and The 13th Note, two venues in Glasgow, focusing on understaffing, unsafe conditions, and poverty wages. They argue that militant organising and strong unionisation are crucial for hospitality workers. Despite setbacks in the form of business closures, they argue for the potential of workers’ cooperatives in the hospitality industry.

In Grassroots organising with the support of a Big Union? Reflections on Unite Hospitality, Megan and Will, members of the Unite Hospitality branch, discuss the urgent need for organising within the industry. They examine the benefits and challenges of unionising through larger unions like Unite, emphasising the need for a grassroots approach. It highlights the importance of worker mobilisation, resource allocation, and the unique demands of the hospitality sector.

In Close the door behind you: Reflections of an ex-bouncer, Nick interviews two of his ex-colleagues and gives his own reflection on being a bouncer. They discuss the impact of COVID-19, economic pressures, and how individualistic and chauvinistic attitudes pushed on workers in the industry could be countered through considered, industrial organising.

In Challenging Sexual Harassment in Low Paid and Precarious Hospitality Work, two researchers worked with the Sheffield Trades Council to explore the prevalence of sexual harassment in the hospitality industry. They attribute it to the sexualisation of service work, precarious employment contracts, employer preferences for vulnerable workers, and labour market deregulation.

In Organising Culture in the Hospitality Industry, two hospitality organisers in Scotland discuss the successes and challenges of initiatives like Better Than Zero and Unite Hospitality. The authors propose avenues for sustainable worker organising, primarily around cultural organising to raise class consciousness and solidarity in an unorganised industry.

In Political Economy of Hospitality, George and Callum critically examine the state of the British hospitality industry, exploring its profound challenges and systemic issues. It highlights the sector’s heavy reliance on imported goods and services, alongside its struggles with technological stagnation and rising operational costs.

Organising hospitality workers in Britain

It is important that we understand what is at stake with hospitality worker organising. Hospitality covers a range of different labour processes. At the core, hospitality work is not that different to the industrial work that it is increasingly displacing. Taking the beans out of the can is not so different to putting them in. Indeed, serving up commodities after they have been produced and distributed involves many additional demands. Rarely do we just want drink or food slopped out into any old container. Instead, workers do not just serve drinks, but they produce an environment in which consumers are willing to pay more.

This kind of work, broadly categorised as hospitality, has grown alongside the wider trends of deindustrialisation in Britain. Much of the workforce is younger, often finding this work alongside studying or training for other kinds of work. There is a risk of understanding hospitality as something that people only do for a while, and therefore negative conditions as some sort of “rite of passage.” Even if workers do not identify strongly with the work, many are spending longer periods of time in hospitality, particularly following the 2008 financial crisis.

The hospitality sector provides many people with their earliest encounter with work. As such, it can be a highly formative experience defining how individuals relate to work for the duration of their lives. Service sector work, in particular, often serves as a gateway where workers are initiated into the deeply ingrained class attitudes, especially prevalent in Britain, regarding the status of different job types. This is often compounded by a deeply entrenched generational class divide, which gives concrete expression to an anti-youth political consensus, alongside a concentrated manifestation of sexism. Workers respond to this experience in a variety of ways. Some absorb these elitist perceptions about service work and use their stint in the industry to justify an ethos of individualistic career aspiration. Others discover in the undervalued status of service work an initial inclination to defy workplace discipline: lock-ins, petty theft, extended breaks, sick days, subversion of customer service expectations, socialising on the clock, and so on.

People come to hospitality work from a range of social origins and vastly different levels of opportunity, and this often shapes the trajectories taken by hospitality workers. While this can fragment class unity in economic terms, it can also produce novel political alliances cutting across many other social issues, which feeds back into the economic struggle. It is clear, therefore, that the stakes of organising in this sector are extremely high, not just for the industry itself, but for the broader workers’ movement.

As many contributions in this issue conclude, an organised hospitality sector could play a crucial role in rebuilding a culture of workplace militancy. When we enter a workplace for the first time, we encounter an existing set of informal and formal norms. These are the historic outcomes of managerial directives, social and professional hierarchies, interpersonal relations and worker resistance. The self-organisation of a workforce around a fundamental antagonism between workers and bosses can radically transform this structure of norms. The initial phase of this struggle may be embittered as opposing interests, typically manifesting in more subtle forms, are brought to the fore and sharpened. However, this open conflict can ultimately recast workplace divisions in the long term, setting a new standard for incoming workers as they acclimate to the professional environment. This is the challenge currently facing hospitality workers. Winning over this sector to organised militancy could lead to dramatic and far-reaching changes, particularly given the demographic features of this workforce.

Organising at Starbucks

The story of Starbucks in the US is an important reference point for understanding organising in hospitality. The current wave of unionisation began in 2021 with the unionisation of a store in Buffalo, New York with Starbucks Workers United. At the start of 2024, Starbucks agreed to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. This was a long fight that involved workers collectively organising with petitions, marches on the boss, walkouts, strikes, and plenty of press coverage. Workers have struck across 200 stores and won union elections at over 400 stores. Starbucks Workers United, which is part of SEIU, now represents 10,000 workers out of a workforce of approximately 250,000. As one of the workers involved in the campaign, Sarah Pappin, argued: “We want to not just open the door for the rest of the food service industry, we want to kick it down. Eventually you get tired of jumping to the next job and praying it’s gonna be better. You realize you should just take a stand where you have some good ground.”¹

There is a longer history of attempts at organising Starbucks, including an IWW campaign in 2004. At that time, Starbucks had gone through a period of rapid expansion. This was during the height of the anti-globalisation movement, when many activists were more likely to smash the windows of a Starbucks than support organising workers behind the counter. At the time, the mainstream labour movement was not interested in organising these new non-union jobs. Instead, the IWW experimented for ten years organising in Starbucks, focusing on more militant tactics.

This history laid the basis for the new wave of organising in the last few years. Workers at Starbucks, starting with the stores in Buffalo, developed a new organising model that fit their work. It focused on identifying a core group of workers in a store, connecting them up through the network of Starbucks Workers United. They then organised store-by-store, with workers taking control of the demands, tactics, and strategy. The national network provided a way to publicise victories and encourage contact with other Starbucks workers.

The Starbucks workers have been able to connect with the labour movement and left, particularly the DSA and post-Bernie campaigns. However, as Kim Moody has argued, like with the organising at Amazon, “what strikes me about what’s going on now is that it’s not being done by professional organizers … A lot of these campaigns are being initiated by the workers themselves, much as auto workers did in the 1930s.”² Workers have been brought into the labour movement, including through initiatives to support new worker organising, like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC). It is important that connections are made between new and older parts of the labour movement, in order that these lessons can be shared and made sense of.

One of the most important victories of the Starbucks campaign is popularising the idea of unionis. Starbucks workers have become a symbol of the new wave of worker organising, inspiring other groups of workers to start taking the first steps. They provide a powerful example of what union drives involve and what union members can look like today. The significance of organising at a global brand like Starbucks is that it can open up discussions of unions across many different countries, as workers see their international colleagues taking action. However, the structures of Starbucks and the peculiarities of labour law in the US shape the way this organising has developed. Rarely can international lessons be directly applied, but Starbucks provides a powerful example to point to.

Last orders at the bar

Chains like Starbucks are an important example of the shifts in service work. In Britain, the growth of a centralised hospitality industry linked to international finance requires much greater attention. What becomes clear reading the contributions in this issue, is that workers want to organise and struggle for more. What seems to be missing is any project of mass organisation. Workers are treated as disposable by bosses who at the same time seem perplexed about a staffing shortage. Unions seem equally sceptical of the potential of hospitality workers, seeing the high turnover of staff as a sign these workers are unorganisable.

With all this scepticism, it is easy to forget that the hospitality industry is growing yearly. The centralisation of ownership has seen an influx of fixed capital into the workplace. This means a much greater investment in tech-fixes in the labour process. Digitalisation means workers are interacting with a range of different systems that manage and control the forms of services they produce, the allocation of shifts and tips, and stock level management to name a few. Centralisation also means that workers are often working with more colleagues in larger venues, serving a higher volume of customers.

It is clear that COVID-19 has had a lasting impact on the hospitality sector. Many of the costs of this crisis fell on hospitality workers. There is also a risk that workers will continue to have to pay the price of the recovery, even as we get further from the pandemic. The picture within the pub industry, which has featured in several of the inquiries in this issue, is more mixed. Although many pubs continue to close each year, some of the larger chains are taking advantage of the situation. For example, Admiral Taverns (owned by Proprium Capital Partners) is buying 37 Fuller’s pubs for £18.3 million while also planning another £28 million in refurbishments. There is increased capital spending across the industry. For example, Heineken is investing £40 million this year, while Green King is investing £40 million into a new brewery site. Fuller’s announced a 60% rise in full-year pre-tax profits to £20.5 million, committing to investing £30 million. Similarly, JD Wetherspoons increased its investment in new and existing pubs to £44 million in the last six months.³

At present, there is a reorganisation taking place. As one industry commentator noted, ‘Pub companies are also regaining confidence through restructuring and estate rationalisation to create leaner, more profitable portfolios.’⁴ Spending is increasing in pubs, both with slowing inflation, increases to the minimum wage, and major sports events taking place. As another commentator notes, ‘There’s still a real appetite among the British public to go to the pub … the challenge in our sector is to translate that revenue into profit, because the cost of doing business is still pretty high.”⁵ This poses an important challenge to workers: can they translate their latent power at the bar into something more?

While hospitality retailing is significantly affected by both the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis, it is important to maintain sight of the fact that an enormous amount of profit is being made in this industry. Young workers have become the central target of the hospitality industry, and deindustrialisation means there are very few options beyond it. Workers can win. It will not be easy, but with so little fought for in the industry, the low-hanging fruit is there for the picking. If we are to re-draw our class maps for our current moment, to understand how the working class might wield political power now, organising and winning with these young workers is an important investment in the future of the labour movement.

For workers, the challenge is to translate the need for labour-power in the hospitality industry into their own power over conditions. The centralisation of capital in the hospitality industry, particularly with the entrance of more private equity, changes the terrain that workers fight on. Successfully building power requires many more experiments, taking risks, and trying new approaches. As with Starbucks, there are no reasons why this kind of work cannot be organiseable; it is just yet to be organised.

There are differences and similarities with the Starbucks experience. We have Starbucks and other coffee shop chains, as well as the growth of pub, bar, and restaurant chains. It is important to remember that the Starbucks organising did not happen suddenly - even if it surprised many. Instead, it was built over a long period of time, with different experiments that found success. However, there are yet to be major changes in terms and conditions, mainly the campaign has been limited to union ratification votes. There are differences in trade union law, contractual issues, and attitudes of unions. However, many of the conditions are similar. These are often younger workers, facing precarious conditions and bullying managers. Unions may still not take this kind of work seriously, but workers can look to the Starbucks example of inspiration.

One of the most exciting aspects of the uptick in hospitality organising featured in this issue is the potential these struggles hold, both for transforming the industry, as well as in providing a training ground for a new generation of workplace militants. Hospitality is not an easy industry to organise in. Even if campaigns do not succeed, organising in a hostile and anti-union environment provides many lessons that can be taken into new workplaces. We commissioned the pieces in this issue to try and understand the central question: how can we organise in the hospitality industry? This question is still unsolved.

One example that could help answer this question is the Organise Now! campaign to support workers organising in hospitality chains. The Starbucks model offers limited guidance here. For a campaign like this to work, there needs to be focused organising workplace-by-workplace, as well as a strategic campaign across the chain. However, in Britain the shop-by-shop model can be harder to sustain, particularly in a large chain, without the propagandistic victories that union ratification votes can provide. Instead, workers need to win both smaller and bigger victories along the way.

As well as shop-by-shop or hospitality firm-based organising, hospitality workers may also look to experiment with area-based attempts at worker organising that have been successful in organising other industries. In 1910, thousands of, mostly women, chainmakers in the Black Country went on strike together. These workers were employed in small factories or domestic hearths, meaning before the strike they were atomised through their separation between various different small employers. However, in August 1910, their union demanded the implementation of the minimum wage in their local area, initiating a strike and lockout across the Black Country. Thousands of workers were brought together, joining their individual workplace struggles into one larger one. After ten weeks on strike, they won their demands.⁶ The historic example of the chainmakers shows the potential of escalating smaller workplace struggles into larger, regional ones in areas where specific industries dominate the local economy, such as is the case with hospitality in the neighbourhoods of many contemporary cities and towns. Indeed, this organising is already happening, such as with projects like the South London Bartenders Network and Sheffield Needs A Payrise, both reflected on in this issue’s contributions.

New initiatives are experimenting with the way forward, whether during pub workers’ breaks or after a shift in a coffee shop. These experiments develop when workers try to support each other, suggest a first meeting together, or find a tactic that works. The challenge is finding a way to go beyond propaganda for unions and translate organising into economic and political victories. As with other kinds of work, it will be those in the sector that will find an answer to the question of organising.