It is important that we understand what is at stake with hospitality worker organising. Hospitality covers a range of different labour processes. At the core, hospitality work is not that different to the industrial work that it is increasingly displacing. Taking the beans out of the can is not so different to putting them in. Indeed, serving up commodities after they have been produced and distributed involves many additional demands.

Rarely do we just want drink or food slopped out into any old container. Instead, workers do not just serve drinks, but they produce an environment in which consumers are willing to pay more. This kind of work, broadly categorised as hospitality, has grown alongside the wider trends of deindustrialisation in Britain. Much of the workforce is younger, often finding this work alongside studying or training for other kinds of work. There is a risk of understanding hospitality as something that people only do for a while, and therefore negative conditions as some sort of “rite of passage.” Even if workers do not identify strongly with the work, many are spending longer periods of time in hospitality, particularly following the 2008 financial crisis.

People come to hospitality work from a range of social origins and vastly different levels of opportunity, and this often shapes the trajectories taken by hospitality workers. While this can fragment class unity in economic terms, it can also produce novel political alliances cutting across many other social issues, which feeds back into the economic struggle. It is clear, therefore, that the stakes of organising in this sector are extremely high, not just for the industry itself, but for the broader workers’ movement. As many contributions in this issue conclude, an organised hospitality sector could play a crucial role in rebuilding a culture of workplace militancy. When we enter a workplace for the first time, we encounter an existing set of informal and formal norms. These are the historic outcomes of managerial directives, social and professional hierarchies, interpersonal relations and worker resistance. The self-organisation of a workforce around a fundamental antagonism between workers and bosses can radically transform this structure of norms. The initial phase of this struggle may be embittered as opposing interests, typically manifesting in more subtle forms, are brought to the fore and sharpened. However, this open conflict can ultimately recast workplace divisions in the long term, setting a new standard for incoming workers as they acclimate to the professional environment. This is the challenge currently facing hospitality workers. Winning over this sector to organised militancy could lead to dramatic and far-reaching changes, particularly given the demographic features of this workforce.

The story of Starbucks in the US is an important reference point for understanding organising in hospitality. The current wave of unionisation began in 2021 with the unionisation of a store in Buffalo, New York with Starbucks Workers United. At the start of 2024, Starbucks agreed to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. This was a long fight that involved workers collectively organising with petitions, marches on the boss, walkouts, strikes, and plenty of press coverage. Workers have struck across 200 stores and won union elections at over 400 stores. Starbucks Workers United, which is part of SEIU, now represents 10,000 workers out of a workforce of approximately 250,000. As one of the workers involved in the campaign, Sarah Pappin, argued: “We want to not just open the door for the rest of the food service industry, we want to kick it down. Eventually you get tired of jumping to the next job and praying it’s gonna be better. You realize you should just take a stand where you have some good ground.”

While hospitality retailing is significantly affected by both the climate crisis and the cost of living crisis, it is important to maintain sight of the fact that an enormous amount of profit is being made in this industry. Young workers have become the central target of the hospitality industry, and deindustrialisation means there are very few options beyond it. Workers can win. It will not be easy, but with so little fought for in the industry, the low-hanging fruit is there for the picking. If we are to re-draw our class maps for our current moment, to understand how the working class might wield political power now, organising and winning with these young workers is an important investment in the future of the labour movement.

We didn’t go through legalistic routes with our action - it was a wildcat strike. Our walkout lasted less than an hour. But it took place on a Friday evening, so it went from maybe 200 people in the bar, over two floors, to the place being cleared because people weren’t being served for about 45 minutes. That was really incredible. During the strike, we had a petition that went round to customers to get public support for our strike action. We got around 50 signatures from people. The punters were really enthusiastic and on-board with what we were doing.

If there is something poetic in these kinds of organising, it is poetry of the kind that Tom Leonard says most people do not think of as poetry: about politics, employment, what people do with their time. It goes far beyond what is considered the normal way of organising in the hospitality industry. But if we are concerned about the creation of class culture and our contribution to composing a stronger, more self-conscious and powerful working class, these are all worthwhile organising initiatives. The normal approach to organising is to identify suffering or grievance, to focus in on it, and to set out to achieve the negation of this negative, in other words, to frame and gain a positive win which is related to the worker’s conditions, income, or prosperity. This is a noble aim and it is and always will be a mainstay of union organising. But it need not be the only one. ‘Why are you so soundly, so solemnly convinced that only the normal and the positive – in brief, convinced that prosperity alone is advantageous? I’m not campaigning for suffering, or for prosperity. I’m advocating … my own caprice and that it should be guaranteed me when the need arises.’ So wrote Fyoder Dostoyevsky, but you do not need to be a Dostoyevsky wannabe to think that a positive, pay–and-conditions, prosperity-focused type of organising can develop alongside a more capricious and creative organising style and impulse. And if Dostoyevsky focused on the I, communist organising is focused on the we, and on our common capacity, caprice, and creativity.

From the late 19th century onwards, Britain’s ruling class benefited from the rising productivity in the factories, imperialist domination in the colonies, a gendered division of labour in the home, and the relentless exploitation of cheap natural resources everywhere. These combined to facilitate a series of different class compositions that successfully subjugated the working class, despite moments of revolutionary potential. Each time the rising costs of natural inputs (principally labour, food, raw materials and energy) began to place limits on accumulation, a combination of geographical expansion, enclosure, and new scientific revolutions opened up a new ecological surplus that could be exploited. These surpluses offered the ruling class room for manoeuvre and allowed it to use working class struggles to drive new processes of development, thereby cutting off routes that led towards revolutionary situations. But now in the 21st century, that new surplus isn’t forthcoming - and, in fact, the bills run up through past exploitation are coming due. In the language of Jason Moore, we have witnessed the transition from the accumulation of surplus value to the accumulation of negative value.