We should all stand up to bully bookcase bosses
AS WE find ourselves immersed in recession, workers’ rights are about to collapse like a flat-pack wardrobe thrown together when drunk.
Last week it emerged shop steward Richie Venton was sacked by IKEA after resisting cuts to workers’ sick pay during a pandemic.
Bosses claimed he “breached confidentiality” by forewarning staff of the cuts – basically doing the job he was elected to do.
More than 5000 people have now signed up to the Reinstate Richie Venton campaign – and if you haven’t done so already, you should.
It’s a great opportunity to focus that anger built up while being herded round IKEA, scrawling names like Knoppang with a blunt pencil on a list while inwardly weeping.
I admit I have so many cushions and throws from IKEA, archaeologists who one day dig up my home will think it was a textile factory.
I will never get back the eight hours of sweat and frustration assembling a flat- pack wardrobe I grew to despise so much that I wanted to crawl inside it and drink myself to death.
This battle with a company worth billions isn’t just about Richie or the workers he has fought for but anyone who has a job or needs one.
So if you can queue for two hours because you desperately need a Hygge candle, then you can go online and show solidarity with a man who has dedicated his life to workers’ rights.
We are about to enter an employers’ market when firms will exploit the fear of workers even more than they already do.
They will take full advantage of this pandemic, crushing workers in the midst of the most terrifying age of modern times.
I remember growing up in a small town in Thatcher’s Britain of 25 per cent unemployment, when the job ads shrunk to a page in our local paper and
consisted of chefs and carers and not much else. It was under these conditions that Thatcher’s decimation of the unions began in earnest, when it wasn’t just the miners who were the “enemy within” but all organised labour.
She took a sledgehammer to protections and employment legislation, hard fought for and won over decades.
Men like Richie Venton lived through that demoralising chapter in our history but, instead of growing weary and apathetic, he dug in and never lost his faith in the ability of organised labour to fight back.
He is the sturdy Chesterfield oak to IKEA’s plywood easy chair, and
it’s thanks to men like him that we have any rights left ft at all.
Under his stewardship p at IKEA, more than 60 per cent of the staff joined the union in an industry where 15 per cent is a stretch.
Now the workers are threatening industrial action unless Richie gets back a job he has held for more than 12 years.
It’s down to him that their conditions improved over the years, but without him they are bound to be eroded.
It is up to us to decide if we support them, knowing that in fighting for themselves, workers like thothose in IKEA are setsetting a precedent of resistancer against all ccorporate giants. TThe strength of a uniounion lies not only in its membersm but in the solidarity from those outside it – and there is no greater powepower than the purse and ire of the consumer. IIn thithis titime when we feel so powerless, we have the chance to control the outcome of the battle workers are waging with IKEA. Sign up to the campaign, demand more of IKEA, and in doing so help secure a fairer working life for all of us.