No Justice, No Peas: Inside the Toby Carvery Union Drive

When a thunderstorm sent rain pouring through the ceiling of the grade two listed Toby Carvery in Bolton, Greater Manchester and directly into the electrical light fittings, Jude assumed that the restaurant would be evacuated. Instead, the 26-year-old’s co-workers shunted metal basins to collect the cascading water, and switched off the lights in the restaurant, before resuming service. Jude was left to serve customers in the damp dark.

Customers were appalled. “They ate their food, paid and left,” said Jude, who chose only to give his first name. “Some customers just straight up walked out. It was chaos that day.”

While the details of this service sound like something out of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, staff at the Toby Carvery in Bolton are dreaming big; trying to make history by becoming the first workers at a major pub chain to gain union recognition. Union officials allege, however, that they are being met with classic anti-union scare tactics. 

It wasn’t just leaking roofs and electrical wires causing Jude concern. Over his two years at the restaurant, he has noticed that there are never enough people on shift – a result of what the senior management euphemistically call “cutting labour costs.” Not only does this make shifts hectic and rushed, with staff jumping between bartending and greeting customers, but it also means that there is never time for tasks like cleaning out the black mould that had started growing in both ice machines.

Then there’s the issue of breaks. Staff say they’re regularly scheduled shifts of six hours, as that’s the longest they’re legally allowed to work before they’re entitled to a break. When staff are lucky enough to get a break, it is all too often interrupted early by a demand to come back to the restaurant when it gets busy.

“Upper management, from area managers to head office, want to see profit margins, targets hit, and lines go up on a graph,” said Jude. “They obviously don’t have much time for staff wellbeing.”

But the final straw came when Jude realised that, when he worked overtime, the till was automatically deducting that time. “If I finished a shift at 9:13, and clocked out on the till, it would automatically roll my time sheet back to 9:00,” Jude said. “I didn’t know it was doing that until I started going through my timesheet just to make sure everything was in the order. And I realised it was taking minutes that I’d worked off.

“I started thinking about how that piled up, at first just for me and how much money I’ve lost. But then I thought, how much money is a company like this stealing from its workers?”

Low-paid workers are the most likely to be victims of wage theft – where you work for time you’re not paid – with the practice being particularly normalised in hospitality, where workers are often expected to stay late on a shift if it’s busy, or not given paid time to clock off.

In hospitality, where unions are rare, the expectation is that workers like Jude will simply put up with stresses and strains like these. And, as right-wingers of all stripes endlessly carp, if they don’t like it, why not quit and find something else?

In 2021, in what came to be known as the Great Resignation, many did just that. With a tight labour market induced by the pandemic, workers suddenly found it easier to find a new job than employers did to find new workers. Emboldened by labour shortages, 400,000 people in the UK quit their jobs between July and September. But while this unprecedented number of workers quitting – many of them in hospitality – drew attention to low pay and poor working conditions, it did little to change them.

“Too often people who’ve worked in hospitality get a sense of satisfaction for handing their notice in and being like ‘fuck you’,” Jude said. “When the reality is that some 16-year-old who’s never had a job before is going to come in and be exploited, just like you. And I think that needs to change.”

That’s what he and his colleagues have set out to do. 

Staff challenging their exploitation in hospitality is nothing new. 2018 saw a flurry of hospitality organising, with the South London Bartenders Network successfully organising Nunhead’s Ivy House, and a campaign for better pay and conditions across Antic pubs. 

The same year saw fast food workers at Wetherspoons, McDonald’s, and TGI Friday’s go on strike, uniting around demands for a £10 minimum wage for all workers, and the recognition of the Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union. But seven years on, no recognition agreements have been secured.

Toby Carvery is owned by the vast pub group Mitchells and Butlers, which encompasses All Bar One, Harvester, O’Neills, and Miller & Carter. Should Jude and his colleagues succeed in getting recognition, it would be a first for workers at a major pub chain. 

In setting out to change their workplace, they are not only fighting for themselves, but upending the deeply held idea that to be a service worker is to be treated poorly and paid badly.

As the workers demand better, they’re also experiencing what is sometimes the harsh reality of union organising in the private sector.

Workers suspected of being union members say management have cut their hours.

One manager referred to the union as a “cult”, and another called a union member a “grass”. Workers suspected of being members have faced interrogations from management, quizzing them on their membership. Unite has launched a collective grievance over victimisation of staff suspected of joining the union, along with other issues.

Byran Simpson, the lead organiser for hospitality at the Unite union, said: “The way in which senior management at Mitchells and Butlers have responded is to do everything they can to shut it down with intimidation and union-busting.

“As the biggest pub chain in the country, their reaction is microcosmic for how some of the most profitable companies in the sector regard unions and their members with contempt. The last thing they want is for low paid, insecure contract workers to interfere with their management prerogative to make money for shareholders.”

Workers aim not to give their bosses too much of a choice in the matter. Previous attempts to unionise pubs have faltered as pub chains have simply refused their workers’ demands for union recognition.

Unite Workers at Bolton’s Toby Carvery hope to avoid this – they have put in an application for union recognition to the Central Arbitration Committee, believing they have secured the requisite 50% union membership density at the site. The statutory independent body has the power to force Toby Carvery to recognise the union.

“The problem for companies like Mitchells and Butlers is that where we have a majority of the workforce, they don’t really have a choice”, says Simpson.

That this is just one group of workers going up against a pub giant isn’t lost on Jude. But he hopes that, by fighting for better at his branch, other hospitality workers will see that unionising is possible: “Things don’t have to be like this.”

A spokesperson for Toby Carvery said: “A few team members, at Toby Carvery Bolton, have raised a number of points through Mitchells and Butlers’s normal internal process, all of which are currently being investigated in full.

“To suggest that such points have been ignored by management is simply untrue. Steps have already been taken to immediately address them, including the hearing by an independent manager.”