Glastonbury (2006)

A Bitter Dispute

Ouch, it can be a bit of a pain in the arse for union bureaucrat types when the workers decide to get a bit too militant in the wrong places.

Via the Dreaming Neon Black blog comes the news that the servers who work at various music festivals for the Workers Beer Company have decided to set up a union.

According to Adam Ford - who was a worker/volunteer himself for the WBC at the recent Leeds Music Festival - apparently trouble has been brewing for a wee while now with disputes over such bread and butter issues as health and safety, working conditions and what happens to the tips given to servers.

It's still early days, so there's no information about which union they are seeking to link up with, but you'd think that they'd give the IWW some consideration? The original Bread & Roses crew for the Pot Noodle & Festival Tickets generation.

I have to admit that I have a declared interest here: the WBC bar was ridiculously overpriced in the Leftfield Tent at Glastonbury Festival a few years back when four of us spent six days in the Green Fields doing an SPGB stall. Surrounded by the spiritual and the trustafarians, alcohol was needed in high doses to get us through the week, and the WBC and their pricing policy had us by the short and curlies.

Couple that with the fact that the WBC pub, the Bread and Roses is just around the corner from the SPGB's Head Office. As I remember it, it was a wine bar masquerading as a pub, with chintzy black and white pictures of Arthur Scargill on the wall, and a clientele that seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Marxism Today, circa 1988. The personal being political, I opted for the Manor Arms pub a few hundred yards down the road.

Hat tip to Alan J.