I wasn’t always a trade unionist. When I started working at Hackney Picturehouse cinema two years ago, aged 23, I would have struggled to tell you what a union did.
What I didn’t know then, was that I had gotten a job at one of a handful of battlefields in the UK where workers were starting to fight back against eroding working conditions and low pay. As I was starting to campaign for a living wage, workers elsewhere were fighting to end outsourcing at several London universities and Uber drivers were taking the company to court over worker rights.
Moving the clock forward, this Tuesday, I am going to march alongside hundreds of Uber drivers, Deliveroo couriers, fast food workers, cleaners and others in what could be the biggest precarious workers march the UK has ever seen.
Supporting these workers, there will be hundreds of others from unions, including the United Voices of the World, the Communication Workers Union and the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union.
The march, organised by the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) coincides with the day the union faces Uber at the Court of Appeal. The protest will also stop at the University of London where outsourced workers are on strike for equal rights and The Doctors Laboratory, where NHS couriers are fighting back against a series of pay cuts.
What’s clear from this upsurge in unity and solidarity is that this movement has grown exponentially in the last two years. Just a few weeks ago, workers from McDonalds, TGI Fridays and Wetherspoons came together with UberEats couriers for the first-ever coordinated strikes among fast food and delivery workers. This was followed a week later by the first nationwide strike of Uber drivers.
For the vast majority of these workers it was the first time they had gone on strike. Like me, they probably knew little about unions before they had a realisation that nothing would change unless they took action.
In my case, that education came when I saw my friends and BECTU union representatives get unfairly dismissed from their jobs simply for having the audacity to demand a living wage.
From then on I started to see things differently. I started noticing how many of my colleagues had to make a choice between paying their utility bills and paying for decent food, and how some would come into work eating from a can of cold baked beans.
I went on strike for the first time and discovered that I had some power to make myself heard. At those picket lines we were joined by Uber drivers, Deliveroo couriers and cleaners who didn’t work at the cinema and that I’d never met before.
While it wasn’t immediately obvious what stake they had in our fight, it quickly became clear. While we might have been come from different countries and been of varying ages, we all shared the same experiences. We live in one of the world’s most expensive cities on poverty wages, often facing the wrath of unaccountable managers.
Since then we have shared many picket lines, marched together in protests and helped each other raise money for each others’ strike funds.
These shared experiences have taught us that unity creates strength. While we are still a minority among British workers, where trade union membership has been in decline since 1979, I can see that we are the beginning of a new movement of precarious workers that holds the key to a better future.
And with each victory we have, be it migrant cleaners defeating the Daily Mail in a living wage dispute or NHS couriers winning the right to bargain collectively, we become stronger.
That’s why I will be march with Uber drivers on Tuesday, because a victory for them is a victory for all of us.