Ex-worker at Glee Club says her contract was terminated while others were called into “union busting meetings” after demanding union recognition.
Unite the union: “This is blatant trade union victimisation and will not be tolerated.”
Glee Club has refuted the claims that staff are being threatened due to the unionisation petition.
UPDATE – Glee Club also denies the claims about working conditions and says the company takes it health and safety responsibilities seriously.
By Ka Long Tung. Cover image: Glee Club, Cardiff, by Ka Long Tung.
Lila had been working at the bar of the popular stand-up comedy and music venue, whilst also working other jobs to supplement her income. As a loyal member of staff, and once the bar manager, she wouldn’t have expected that one day she would be effectively laid off by Glee Club Cardiff.
To protect her identity, Lila is not her real name.
She lost her job within weeks of attempting to unionise with other workers in the Cardiff Bay venue, and Lila says she was not even contacted directly by the employer. Instead, she found out when Glee Club responded to her union’s request for trade union recognition.
Lila had been the bar manager from 2015 until September 2021, when she stepped down from her full time role. But she still stayed on the books and regularly worked shifts for the company.
In mid-January, a group of workers at Glee Club Cardiff, including Lila, asked for union recognition from the company owners, Comic Enterprises Limited. In the firm’s initial response to Unite, they stated that several people couldn’t be included on the petition because they didn’t work there anymore. Lila was one of them and has not been called back for shifts since.
“8 years of loyalty to the same business, 8 years of dedicating extra time, bringing ideas, and supporting the venue. 8 years as a dedicated member of staff to the same business, assuming five roles throughout my tenure, and I didn’t even get notified directly,” Lila says.
“So in short, Glee’s first response was to ban me and others from the process [of unionisation].”
There were even “union-busting meetings” where the company tried to intimidate staff into dropping their case, according to Lila. Workers were told that workplace issues would be easier to sort out without the union getting in the way.
“Staff have been systematically called into union-busting meetings with head office,” Lila recalls. “Where they’ve bee strategically separated from their department heads and vocal members of the union.”
Unite has also accused Glee Club of threatening workers with disciplinary action and even dismissal, labelling it “blatant trade union victimization.”
In response, Glee Club has said that it is “unable to comment on any ongoing internal staff disciplinary issues” but they “refute the factual accuracy of any claims that staff are being threatened due to a unionisation petition”.
Staff given electric shock.
The push for unionisation came in response to a number of workplace issues that are not uncommon across the live entertainment industry.
As a bar manager, Lila recalls there was a summer when the cellar cooling system was broken. It was only six months later that the issue was fixed.
At one stage, there were not enough cashier printers working and the venue manager at the time had to buy new ones on eBay.
The health and safety of workers was also being affected. Lila explains that because of a missing button covers in the glass dishwasher, it has “given several members of staff an electric shock.”
In the kitchen, there was a microwave that would blow a fuse once a fortnight. The venue manager had to bring his old one from home just because the head office wouldn’t agree to pay for a new one.
Lila recalls that cleaning the outdated friers, which did not have an internal cleaning system, was intensive work and could be dangerous. The head office refused requests to upgrade them.
It was only after three years that the kitchen manager convinced them that the staff hours of each cleaning session alone warranted the cost of an external company organising the oil exchange.
Workers also claimed that they had complained for at least 8 months for the hot water to be rectified as they couldn’t even wash their hands properly.
“The kitchen manager had to heat up a huge vat of water on the hob just to do the washing up,” Lila recalls.
It was only when Cardiff Council issued an environmental health notice that Glee Club took the issue seriously.
Lila attributes the hostile conditions to the lack of funding and the head office “placing all responsibility on the venue manager.”
“It has always seemed that the company doesn’t understand they need to spend money in order to make money,” says Lila.
Lila mentions that the old venue manager, who had been in Glee Club Cardiff for 7 years, acted as a buffer against the head office. But this disappeared following his departure in August last year due to a lack of work-life balance.
Although workers had been considering unionisation for years, according to Lila, it was the sudden closure of the venue following the Queen’s death in September last year that triggered the process.
The venue had opened as usual with half the audience seated and food being served when head office told Glee Club to close with immediate effect. The team then was left to handle liaising with the promoter, cancelling shows, communicating with customers, and dealing with wasted stock.
“Head office…gave no support to the team in terms of how to deal with the situation logistically,” Lila says. “The shift finished early, and a dozen of the team lost those hours without warning.”
It was not the company at fault for the breaking news, Lila acknowledges, but it was them who made the decision to close the venue without consulting workers which she thinks was “an attempt to align with public opinion.”
“Staff have no power, no means of communication, and no voice,” Lila describes the relationship in the workplace.
With all the issues accumulated, workers wrote a grievance letter to employers in November last year and then began the process of demanding recognition.
A letter asking for voluntary recognition of the bargaining unit from the company was sent in mid-January, with workers receiving a letter rejecting the request at the end of the month.
As part of their effort to stop unionisation, the company told workers that they would be getting a pay rise. Although technically true, this also came at the same time as the increase in the minimum wage. Lila says that Glee Club usually pays around 10-80p above minimum wage, so the increase likely reflected this and would have happened anyway.
Following the employers’ rejection, workers had no choice but to get recognition through the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC) to attain collective bargaining in February.
Trade union recognition means that a group of workers have the right to collectively negotiate over key terms such as pay and working conditions, through their union. In workplaces where recognition does not exist, the union must first ask the company for recognition. If this is turned down, they can force recognition via the CAC.
In a decision on 22 March, CAC accepted the union’s application but approval for recognition is yet to be decided.
It is expected that a successful application would be the beginning of change for workers’ well-being.
“The staff… are not asking for anything unusual,” says Lila. “They just want stability of their hours, and accountability from the company when the job is difficult in silly avoidable ways.”
“I think it [gaining recognition] would make a big difference because probably the biggest frustration with these issues is that there’s no official channel of communication.”
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