Food delivery couriers in the IWGB union have challenged Labour’s Philip Glanville, the mayor of Hackney, to meet them and negotiate over their demands for a safe parking area in the Dalston, East London, after the mayor denied that an immigration raid on couriers in the area was a result of the couriers’ campaign for free parking space where they can wait for orders.
Eight riders were arrested in Dalston for “immigration offences” in January, just two days after protests were held outside Hackney Town Council demanding safe parking spaces.
London’s Metropolitan Special Constabulary (LMSC) said that the arrests were part of “a joint operation” involving “Hackney Police”. Philip Glanville, however, denied that the Council were complicit on the raids, and claimed they had “gone above and beyond in working to ensure that drivers have safer conditions” and that they were “liaising directly with the drivers and their representatives on their concerns.”
The IWGB union’s Couriers & Logistics Branch dispute this, and in response issued a statement to Granville: “As a majority BAME and migrant workforce who work entirely in public space, delivery riders are already disproportionately targeted by police and immigration enforcement in their personal and daily lives. As you know, this is a community of riders that has also already been subject to, for months, a concerted effort by the police and civil enforcement officers to force them out of their workplace. You should understand, therefore, that the riders’ parking campaign and the issue of immigration enforcement are inextricably linked.
“If you are serious that Hackney Council does not support immigration raids linked to enforcement action, we urge you to come to Ashwin Street to meet with riders, to negotiate on our demands about building a free and safe working environment for couriers in Hackney.” The couriers went on to reject Glanville’s claim that the council had sought to ensure safe working conditions for couriers, saying they had “yet to see any evidence of this”.
Parking at the Bentley Road car park in Dalston will cost £2 an hour from March onwards, which the couriers described as “an unacceptable cost for low-paid workers who can receive as little as £2 an hour during shifts”. The additional cost may force couriers to go back to their previous waiting place, on Ashwin Street, where there has been a concerted attempt to move them off, including through the use of £65 council fines, following plans for the regeneration of a nearby road. The IWGB have previously condemned this as “gentrification in action”, and in their statement to Glanville they said that Bentley Road was much more “isolated and dangerous especially at night” for couriers “who already endure disproportionately high levels of abuse, assault, harassment and theft”.
Financial support for the IWGB Couriers and Logistics Branch can be donated here
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This kind of a ‘holistic’ approach to targetting lowpaid migrant workers is hardly new to Hackney, however – as a strike from more than 30 years ago illustrates… a tale of policing, and immigration raids being used to attack migrant workers (many refugees) on behalf of bosses and the repressive regime the workers had fled…
Bacton Fashions in Somerford Grove, Dalston, was a clothing sweatshop employing up to 90 workers. It was located in an industrial unit along with other clothing sweatshops. Workers from the different firms used the same entrance to go to work.
Like much of East London, Hackney was home to many clothing factories – often small, employing often migrant labour, on low pay in poor conditions. The 1991 census figures showed that 12,000 manufacturing jobs solely in the clothing industry in 1981. Many of these jobs were in the textile sweatshops which were dotted around the borough.
Most of Bactons workers were Turkish or Kurdish, had been living in Britain for less than a couple of years and were waiting for a Home Office decision on their rights to remain in the UK. Within the factory there were some members of TGWU’s new 1/1312 textile workers’ branch. The branch, formed at the initiative of the political organisation, the Union of Turkish Workers, with the assistance of Hackney Trade Union Support Unit and Service Workers Advisory Project (SWAAP) had recruited almost 600 workers locally.
A series of small-scale strikes had led to a union recognition agreement being signed at Dizzi Limited in nearby Well Street. There were regular leafleting sessions of factories and meetings on workers’ rights at community centres.
The workers at Bacton Fashions had many complaints about low pay, long hours, terrible health and safety conditions, no holiday or sick pay, victimisation, continuous lay-offs without pay and a management prepared to act dictatorially.
The workers themselves were not completely defenceless as they included some that had brought revolutionary traditions from the cities and villages of Turkey and Kurdistan. The previous year (1989) over 4,500 refugees had come to Hackney fleeing the war in Kurdistan. They joined, at least, another twenty to thirty thousand Turkish speaking workers in east London. Almost none of these workers were unionised and no major union had thought to change this. For example, none had ever appointed a Turkish speaking official.
When eight workers at Bacton Fashions refused to accept being ‘laid off’ they began picketing. Appeals to other workers to respect their picket line were met sympathetically, but little else. The employer, Mustafa Dill, was sufficiently embarrassed to re-employ the workers and to agree to lay off pay during slack periods. However, he kept breaking his word and there were almost daily walkouts over the next few weeks, as agreements were reached then broken once again.
Bacton Fashions itself was located in an industrial unit along with other clothing sweatshops. Workers from the different firms used the same entrance to go to work
During the Bacton strike, it became a regular practice at the end of the working day for workers from all the firms in the industrial unit to join with the strikers and jeer and handclap the boss and his managerial team as they left work. There was no violence, although tensions were clearly running high. Up to 400 people were involved in this daily humiliation of the boss and managers.
Demands from union branch members for the TGWU to make the strike official were refused, requests for strike pay was therefore ignored and strikers were instructed that they couldn’t even make financial appeals on TGWU headed notepaper.
There was no attempt by the union official, Brian Theobald, to spread the dispute to other factories or to use what was happening to recruit other workers into the TGWU. He came to the picket line on a small number of occasions and took no part in strike meetings.
On February 26th 1990 the evening picket of about 100 people was attacked by the paramilitary Territorial Support Group of the Metropolitan Police. There was a fierce fight, during which the police were initially chased from the scene, before re-grouping and attacking the pickets and their supporters.
Four pickets (all Kurdish refugees) were arrested and charged with riotous behaviour and actual bodily harm. They faced possible deportation if convicted.
Around 150 people picketed Dalston police station until 5am in the morning.
The next morning (27.02.1990) no one from any of the factories located in the same building as Bacton Fashions crossed the picket line, forcing Bactons to close.
The police attack came almost exactly a year to the day after police raided a number of factories in Hackney (on 27/2/1989) and arrested 38 Kurdish and Turkish workers. By the next day, seven had been deported and a further fourteen were under threat. This action came in the wake of a wave of raids across North and East London.
A protest against deportation raids in Hackney, 1989
The February 1989 raids had in fact themselves sparked the formation of the 1/1312 textile workers’ branch in the first place.
A campaign to defend “The Bacton 4” was launched at a demo of 400 on April 7th. The campaign helped to secure ‘not guilty’ court verdicts for all four arrestees when their case came to trial in October 1990. It emerged that Special Branch had visited Bactons and showed the security guard photographs of recent demonstrations in London against a visit of Turkish leader General Evren – these photos apparently originated at the Turkish Embassy.
One striker Tekin Kartel, later received a five figure sum in damages for what had happened to him.
Bactons was eventually forced to close permanently, only to re-open under a different name and at a different location later. Picketing and a refusal by workers to work there led to its closure again.
As Mark Metcalf of the Colin Roach Centre put it:
‘Police Hurt during factory protest’ (Newspaper clipping). Nice slant you’ve got there.
While the workers lost their poorly paid jobs they achieved a degree of success showing the employers that they could not do everything they wanted and needed to take the workers needs into account when making decisions. The workers established a pride in fighting back; they closed down the factory and demonstrated they had the power to not only damage the employers’ profits but get rid of it!
All in all, the strike was not well supported by the local trade union movement and the TGWU’s conduct didn’t impress the workers in local clothing outfits. Branch membership fell dramatically and recruitment became much more difficult.
However, local textile workers would strike again. On January 3rd 1991 over 2,500 London textile workers took solidarity action with their fellow workers on general strike in Turkey on the same day. Factories in Shacklewell Lane, Somerford Grove, Victorian Grove, Tyssen Street, Tudor Grove and Arcola Street were virtually empty as workers refused to cross picket lines.
Once again, police took the opportunity to attack migrant workers on strike. Police vans were driven at speeds of over 70mph to the Halkevi community centre on Stoke Newington High St, and officers jumped from the vehicles to race into a crowd of around 120. Five people were grabbed and when friends tried to stop their arrests, around 20 police officers drew their truncheons and batoned people to the ground, arresting them as they fell. One woman went to St Barts Hospital with a broken leg.
At 2pm a crowd of 150 went to protest outside Stoke Newington police station and when in protest 30 sat down, on the other side of the road to the station, the police paramilitaries of the Bow TSG rushed across the road and violently arrested dozens of people. Others fled, but were pursued by the police in all directions.
62 people were arrested with four being taken by the police to Homerton hospital. Access to the casualty department was denied by police at the entrance. 29 people were charged with serious public order offences. Many arrestees were beaten whilst in police custody.
Local police monitoring & defendants support group, Hackney Community Defence Association, set up support for the arrested. HCDA identified the January 3rd arrests as pure revenge for the police loss of face over the confrontations at Bactons:
“The facts speak for themselves. TSG officers have an image of themselves as an elite force, and they behave as if answerable to nobody but themselves. There is a certain inevitability that wherever they go, trouble is sure to follow.”
Two of the arrestees, Haci Bozkurt and Baki Ates, both 34 and from Stoke Newington, received a great deal of press coverage when their cases eventually came to trial five years later. Both had been granted political asylum after fleeing Turkey to escape police violence and persecution, when they were arrested for protesting about police arrests and violence, and charged with violent disorder. At Highbury Corner magistrates court in May 1991 no evidence was offered against Mr Bozkurt. Mr Ates was acquitted.
Turkish and Kurdish refugees (like other communities) in Hackney experienced policing as a repressive and violent force; that the police supported employers, acted as frontline troops for immigration deportations, and also tried to attack political refugees on behalf of vicious regimes from other countries was hardly a surprise. Racism and hatred of ‘foreigners’ at a ground level in the force served as the street level strongarm of blatant support for capitalists at a higher level, and the barely hidden hand of secret policing (which often co-operated with/acted as a proxy for repressive regimes…)
That Special Branch had intervened on behalf of the Turkish regime was hardly unique either. Only a couple of years after the events described above, Hackney Trade union Support Unit, which had played a part in assisting the Turkish and Kurdish workers to set up the TGWU branch, and Hackney Community Defence Association, which had helped defend the arrested strikers, together with other local activists, set up the ground-breaking Colin Roach Centre, named for a man who died in a local police station 10 years before), as a meeting and organising space. Police, and specifically Special Branch, would continue their multi-faceted/multi-agency defence of existing power relations, & attempts at repression of those trying to challenge them: Mark Jenner of the Branch’s Special Demonstration Squad was infiltrated to spy on the Colin Roach Centre, due to HCDA/TUSU’s involvement, and the Centre’s affiliation to Anti Fascist Action (AFA). Jenner used this connection to infiltrate trade union activists and reported on their organising back to the SDS, who passed some of this info to blacklisting organisations working to target trade unionists and workers on behalf of employers (he also spied on AFA and other groups).
Police act for the bosses – Never forget it.
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Nicked from the Radical History of Hackney, some bits owe thanks to Neil Transpontine and Mark Metcalf.
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past tense 
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