Leaflet on hotel workers’ strike (Accor, France)

We publish the following leaflet “The collective for solidarity with Faty Mayant and workers for Accor” because of its aim of dealing with the Accor struggle on an international and practical level. We disagree with it’s analysis of ‘subcontracting’ which describes it as the main tool in the hands of the bosses to increase exploitation, and as the main target which we are supposed to fight against. Of course the legal level of contracts play a certain part in disputes, but from the bosses’ as well as the workers’ perspective there are more concrete and material issues which really count: it is not the subcontract as such which divides workers, but their spatial isolation, the small working units, the actual division of labour, the strategy of hiring people with different language backgrounds. It is not a contract with the main company that ensures higher wages, better conditions, less work, but the actual relations of power. In each single conflict we have to discuss and practically attack these material problems instead of hoping that the demand for the abolition of ‘subcontracts’ will resolve it for us.

Support Faty - Fight subcontracting. Her fight concerns us all

Subcontracting has become the number one weapon of companies in their offensive against workers. They use it to impose both an intensification of work and substantial wage cuts, by avoiding the strong resistance these would probably have produced if they had been introduced within the big company. By playing on competition between subcontractors and choosing the “best offer” (necessarily the “lowest offer” from the workers’ standpoint), the heads of the companies that control the market encourage over-exploitation and slave-driver-like practices, and at the same time they claim not to be responsible as employers.
But subcontracting also means a radical transformation of the power relations between bosses and workers, to the profit of the bosses, who can destroy the ties of solidarity built up over time by people who work together in a same place, by dividing workers into distinct units. Workers doing the same kind of job (and often working side by side) find themselves with different bosses, which makes it much more difficult for them to fight collectively for their demands.
It’s not surprising, then, that subcontracting is spreading to all sectors, including public services. It has become the main vector in the cut-back race that working people throughout the developed world are experiencing, and a way of importing third-world type working conditions into activities that capitalism can’t relocate. Subcontracting is the key to the brutal offensive by big business that the Bolkenstein directive would make possible on the European level
Fighting the very principle of subcontracting by supporting the struggles of workers in subcontracting businesses: that’s the idea behind the work of the solidarity committee that supported the long, ultimately successful struggle, in 2002-2003, of the cleaning women working for the Arcade company (a subcontractor for Accor, a multinational hotel consortium). It is now supporting Faty Mayant, the women’s union representative, fired by her slave-driving bosses a year after their victory (with the highly political consent of the ministry of Labor). By demanding that Faty be directly hired by Accor, and that the human resources department of Accor keep its promise to put an end to the outsourcing of hotel room cleaning, the collective continues to call for the application of one clear rule: bosses have to directly hire the women and men who work for them. What is at stake in our support for Faty, then, is the fight against subcontracting.
The fight is a long one, and we have already scored some points (a non-compulsory “charter” document defining the conditions under which Accor may resort to subcontracting was written up at the end of the Arcade strike, and cleaning has actually been re-insourced in some hotels since then). But now we have to go on to win completely: to have Faty hired directly by Accor, to make all Accor hotels put a real end to subcontracting.
How can we do that? As a major hotel consortium, Accor has to maintain its image and seduce its customers. That’s why it claims to sell smiles and hospitality (paid for by intense policing of its workers), and also respect for the environment and sustainable development, along with hotel rooms at a wide range of prices. And yet, it continues to impose inhuman working conditions on its cleaning women, via subcontracting. That is what must be denounced.
Accor has built hotels everywhere in Europe and across the world (its other names are Sofitel, Novotel, Mercure, Ibis, Suite Hôtel, Etap and Formule 1 in Europe and Asia, and Red Roof and Motel G in America). So groups everywhere can get together, go into a hotel, settle in the lobby and distribute leaflets, inform customers, talk with the workers, being even more hospitable than they are if possible (that’s what we have been doing for some months now, by picnicking once a week in an Accor hotel, a different one each time). There’s no need to cause a fight. Our battle is a simple one, a battle of convictions, that has to be won over the long term. If all those who feel concerned make a contribution in their own place, we can win.

[prol-position news #2, 5/2005]