TRASHFUTURE - Flippy 2: Son of Flippy feat. Amardeep Singh Dhillon

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Amardeep Singh Dhillon from the South London Bartenders Network joins the gang to talk about precarity, automation, and what’s next in hospitality, and how bartenders in London have been organising to fight back. Are you working in hospitality in London, and do you feel like you need a union? Get in touch with Amardeep! Check out SLBN's website here: https://southlondonbartenders.wordpress.com/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture   *LIVE SHOW ALERT* We’re touring the Midlands, the North, and (one city in) Scotland in May! We’ll be in Birmingham on May 14, Leeds on May 15, Manchester on May 16, and Glasgow on May 21. Tickets are available here: https://www.trashfuture.co.uk/events   *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows and check out a recording of Milo’s special PINDOS available on YouTube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRI7uwTPJtg *ROME ALERT* Milo and Phoebe have teamed up with friend of the show Patrick Wyman to finally put their classical education to good use and discuss every episode of season 1 of Rome. You can download the 12 episode series from Bandcamp here (1st episode is free): https://romepodcast.bandcamp.com/album/rome-season-1 Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. I was getting so used to not having free one this time, just like sort of like having somewhere better to be. It's the free one pushing out of the way. Yeah, if you couldn't tell, listener, Milo was looking at his watch, he was tapping his foot, he was making the, come on, come on, Jester, while saying it was the free one.

It is the free one. Yeah. That's all we can say for sure at this stage. That's right. And I am very happy to welcome our guest. It's Amar Singh Dhillon, editor at Red Pepper, an organizer with the South London bartenders network. Amar, how's it going?

Incredibly caffeinated, but like fine apart from that angel. Thank you. Hell yeah. We've got a show today that's going to be, after we're done with the news, of course, it's going to be all about the changing nature of the hospitality industry and how, in the last few years, organizers have managed to score some wins against a, I would say, quite hostile and aggressive workplace, and that's just the patrons, folks. Yeah, hospitality, don't let the term hospitality mislead you.

Most people are inhospitable as fuck as a general word. But before we get into that, which I'm leading us into with sort of a startup inflected segment, but that's going to come later, we want to issue the first free Booter of the Year award to former Prime Minister Elizabeth Truss, who has... She's just doing shit now, and she's doing the funniest possible shit. She's going to Taiwan in order to bolster their sort of democratic resistance against the People's Republic of China. The one thing that they needed, the one thing that they were missing was the scourge of

hotel bathrobes herself, Liz Truss, and she's just going to be in town. I'm not sure if anyone's even going to take a meeting with her. She's just going to be around. I've had it pointed out to me, though, that she is going to be in Taiwan the same weekend. There's a massive BDSM convention. So get a coincidence. Yeah, absolutely. Here's the thing, right?

If we can send you and Nate, my love, out into the street to do like citizen journalism on the queue, I think we can afford to send me to Taiwan to infiltrate a BDSM convention and see what I can learn. Well, look, you know, the Australians have been dealing with the supposed Chinese threat by building nuclear subs and say, we have sent one nuclear grade sub to Taiwan once for their own preparation. I think it's great. It's like a video game exploit, right, where if you, because she was prime minister for

seven weeks and now can just go around starting wars without actually being a prime minister. And that's feminism. Perfect. Yeah. She's girl bossing. She absolutely is. And I can't wait to see what she gets up to. She's going to get kicked out of so many hotels.

She's going to go to like one of the semiconductor fabs and get like, like loob stains and fingerprints on one of the machines and, and, you know, possibly start a war with China. I can't wait. Liz trusted a microchip factory and somehow walks out with 10 branded bathrobes and they're like, I don't think we think we have those. The rent. Do you have those? Bathrobe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Copyright. Copyright. Yeah. Yeah. Not selling bathrobes.

You're not packaging up like a hundred bathrobes. But it's, it's, it is very amusing though that, um, like being, she's prime minister for seven weeks and because she was prime minister, now just the world is saddled with this bizarre weirdo going around being strange. It's Roman shit. They had a different console every six months, but then they were pro console for the rest of their life. They literally, she's, she's being sent abroad to the provinces.

She's on a pro console admission. Now it's her time to make all of her money by going to Bithynia and, you know, stealing exotic silks or whatever. She's going to go like time to Otowacker being like, you're never going to invade. Yeah. She's going to go and fuck with Mithridati every day. One thing I will say is that this puts the Chinese government in a sort of an awkward position in that they're sort of obliged diplomatically to treat this as a massive provocation,

which requires them to take Liz trust seriously as an idea. And that's, that's really a sort of an awkward position to be in, to be like, how dare you sort of like rebel province of Taiwan host Britain's messiest girl boss. So we are very excited to see what kinds of, what kinds of, before we move on to Liz trust as well, just the other fact that like she's making her former employees now at the foreign office comment, we do not comment on the travel plans of private citizens. Liz trust never heard of her. She never worked here.

Never will. You know. Yeah. So as kind of, you know, like pig pen from the peanuts gang, right? He walks around with a cloud of mess and disorder around him. We have found the Institute, the pig pen of the British institutional setup, just walking around, just, just messing shit. I honestly love her.

You know, I love this for her. Absolutely. Honestly, I'd rather that she like spent more time abroad than she was back here because if the kink of pride discourse starts with Liz trust, I think I might actually have to do some conversion therapy on myself. I'm just, I'm just manifesting something here now. Liz trust as a puppy girl being led around on leash by a Met police officer like that one piece of discourse a few years ago.

Just hold that really rotate that in your mind, you know. Wait, how did you get into my hard drive? So I'm moving on, of course, from, from our, again, no, don't say that we're like, oh, we think she's like unfit for public life because of all this crazy stuff. No, she's the most fit for public life of any of them. No. So bring her back. Yeah.

The, also the Russell T Davies has owned us again. Oh no. Once again. We have been. Has he released a new years and years? Well, no, it's just that stuff released a new years and years, like he's sort of like bin Laden, you know, it's come to a VHS tape that's been hand delivered to CNN, you know. Yeah.

Russell T Davies in Torah Bora, like waggling a finger at the camera. Don't get me started about ISIS. That's right. Yeah. So another because I'm running ISIS and let me tell you it's a bloody tough job. Some of these people are incompetent. So essentially what has happened is as the part of the ongoing escalating bipartisan consensus that it's important to crack down on fully legal asylum seeking and migration in general,

a three story barge, which we use to house migrants is now being built in Falmouth. And again, this is the point of this, of course, is to be as cruel and inhuman as possible. Yeah. It looks like if you've seen this barge, it looks horrific. It's a prison hulk. We're going back to sort of like 19th century solutions for these things. A very British response though, when pictures of it came out, lots of blue check tweets along the lines of, oh, this place looks better than my house and stuff along like the lines

of, you know, this looks like a fancy flat in London that they're going to live there for free. So safe to say. British landlords catching strays. Yeah, but the British landlords have also been owned by this because somehow, even though this monstrosity in the sea looks ugly and is designed to be that way, it also seems to remind them of the luxury of the housing that they charge like shit tons for. Interesting.

What is also happening as well, right? Because you, it's almost barely worth, in terms of like this sort of legislative back and forth, right? It's barely worth thinking about what the Conservatives will do because they're simply going to do what they're going to do. Yeah. Maximum cruelty. But of course, it's always interesting to see the responses from the people who are

supposed to be opposing them. And Kier Stammer has said, now, there has been some flip-flopping on this in the last 24 hours since recording, but flip-flopping from Kier Stammer has said, I don't even own flip-flops. I find them to be a very silly article of footwear, a solid sandal. When you bring in new legislation, Stammer said, it can often involve sort of dealing with the predecessor legislation that there is. It doesn't automatically mean it's necessary to repeal existing legislation in order to

introduce your own when asked if he would repeal the migrant bill. Now, I take what- You could just say yes. You could just say yes, and it would be a free win. Yeah. Exactly. It's very unpopular. And also, again, what he's being is technically right, but not wanting to say he opposes it

because he's worried that the son or the male or whatever is going to say, you know, they're a softie, is soft and migrants and wants to bring in more people to live on your terrible boat. When they knighted Mr. Softie, the inventor of the ice cream. Right? But who cares? They say that anyway. It doesn't matter.

They say it anyway. Yeah, but also, I mean, it's also fully what he believes, right? Like the man is just a career racist and cop. Like this is the same guy who came out saying that he was not opposed to the GPS tagging of criminalized asylum seekers a couple of months ago, right? Like it's not even that he's like bad at politics, which obviously he is. It's also that he's just fully a white supremacist, like this is fully what he wants to do. It's like Blair 2.0 without the charisma as so many other people have said before.

And also, I like that he seems to be articulating the position that no parliament can bind a future parliament except when it's politically convenient to keep the rightward ratchet moving, at which case one parliament can actually bind them. What are you going to do? Repeal the laws of your... No, come on. That would be un-gentlemanly. They worked really hard on those laws.

The racism dialogue goes one way and fortunately. Yeah, that's right. A shorty workmanship, a story of a lifetime, British landlords again. And also, it's the local conservative MP, the only sort of force against this in British politics now appears to be NIMBYism. Yeah, this is really weird. Like any time they try and do this, any time they try and corral migrants into any kind of substandard housing, whether that's like hotels or here, like prison hulks, it's literally

like some sort of like country squire, sort of like gentry MP being like, well, I think that would frighten the horses. And it's like, that's the opposition. It's not Keir Starmer. It's that one guy. Great. There's only one opposition in the country that's actually property prices. So like, hang on a minute, where are you going to put this death camp?

So the person who's actually opposing this legislation is Richard Groverner Plunkett Ernie Airee Drax. Oh, for fuck's sake. Oh, the guy from Moonraker. Yeah, I tend to do a cucumber sandwich, that guy. Yeah. Yeah, so the villain from Moonraker is to the left of Starmer on the issue, as of so far.

Starmer, you appear with a tedious inevitability of an unloved season. So obviously, this is going to be more as it comes, right? But the simple fact, right, that this is to the right of anything even proposed in the Tory manifesto, right, that is just going entirely unopposed by anyone in anyone wearing red ties, sort of shows the sort of the only thing you can really do is the only thing that actually works, which is going and sitting in front of the police van when they're trying to like kidnap people to put in this thing, essentially. I mean, there's a whole sort of diversity of tactics, whether that's like legal challenges

or whatever. But yes, absolutely, it should be untenable to imprison people on the basis of like seeking asylum. I mean, obviously, at the same time as well, I think like, I wasn't going to talk about this, but one of the reasons that the kind of outcry over the arrests that happened over the coronation of our new king over the weekend, one of the reasons that kind of the discourse around that has pissed me off so much is that people talking about how, oh, it's now illegal to protest peacefully in Britain, as if that right hasn't always been like heavily mediated

by like police discretion on the ground. And so like, it's true, I think that like the main resistance to like a prison barge, like on the outskirts of like Falmouth or wherever it is, like, is going to have to come through like direct action and protest on the streets. At the same time, we have a lot of sensible liberals who are like raising the hue and cry about how now it's impossible to protest. Like if you do that, you make it harder for us actually to take action, which we still can do.

You've gotten this sort of like the conscience of the Archbishop of Canterbury aroused, no less an establishment figure than that has been standing up in the House of Lords saying like, you know, this is sort of like morally reprehensible. There's not a difference that's going to make, I don't know, but it certainly speaks to like how alienated they've managed to make liberals. Well, it's the, I think the calculation, right, is that they figured they kind of don't, either they figured they kind of don't need liberals or what we talked about before is just, you know, the, and this sort of actually even plays in some of the local election results

as well, right, is that the Tories have decided that they're sort of, they've, they're actually tired of winning. Yeah. They've now, their program has run out of breath. I actually love being suplexed. Yeah. And yeah, this sort of like a bonfire of the vanities that I'm doing where I'm trying to do like maximum cruelty to as many people as possible on the way out before I'm stopped

by someone who like agrees with 99% of my politics. That's actually kind of a victory lap and, you know, in practical terms, they're right about that. It is a victory lap. It is just them sort of like, you know, spiking the football. Yeah. And the Tories saw that there were no worlds left to conquer and instead of weeping, they went into a sort of kill-dosa type situation where they're just going to keep making things

worse until eventually a SWAT team prized the lid off of their concrete in case bulldozer and shoots them in the head. So the last thing I want to talk about in the news before we go into sort of AI hospitality and organizing in that sense is an ongoing entry in our series of trying to solve Britain's problems by using people from the town or otherwise without solving them. Oh, good. Yeah. So that we can now add to our long list of just use people from the town solutions, which

is included teachers, which is hilarious, border guards, which would be hilarious if it didn't allow for that vigilante-ism to creep into an already quite cruel institution. Taking the front of house at Joanna Cherry's talk at the Edinburgh Fringe. Let's forget. There are now is now being suggested of the government plans to fix NHS staffing to let people become doctors that are getting to Cree. Yes. I'm so happy about this.

One of my big predictions is that eventually the government will try and launch a Skillshare course on how to do surgery. And this is coming so, so close to it. I love this when this came out. It's insane. It's chaotic. It's just, yeah. It's perfect.

I love it. We can finally have surgery, Baz. Yeah. That's right. I think it's amazing that we've got like the government finally coming down on the great kind of like workerist debate of whether or not there is such a thing as like unskilled or skilled labor. They're saying no, or labor is like entirely skilled the same until anyone can do it.

There's no such thing as skilled labor. That's what they're saying. Surgery. Anyone can do that. I'm one of those Twitter threads, but like I'm really excited by this because I can do like an hour's Zoom call training and finally I can make my parents proud of me. It's one hour Zoom call, 55 minutes of which is just GDPR stuff. Oh yeah, don't forget heart important, brain important, other stuff, pretty important.

Go wild. I do. I mean, I also do love the idea of this kind of like precaritizing medicine, I think is one of the most harebrained like things that you would sort of think, but okay, no, they can't do that. They wouldn't do that. Like, you know, with other types of things, accountancy, maybe becoming a criminal lawyer. Perhaps, you know, people do defend themselves in court and they are genuinely quite funny

to listen to. That's what I call a criminal lawyer, but like, oh shit, man, I don't know. That's the last bastion of like middle class, like professionalism left, right, and that's why all of the the BMA's communications have like, for better and for worse, been like, you expect when you become a doctor that you make like good money and now you don't and isn't that fucked. And now they've gone a step further than that where it's like, no, actually, we don't we don't need doctors anymore.

You can just like do it based on vibes. Have a go. Pin. Have a go. Well, look, well, last time I went to the dentist, she let me play with the drill a little bit. You are a dentist now. So I am a dentist now.

She let me do that because she forgot to use the numbing agent for a little bit. And so she was just like, don't sue me. And I was like, okay, let me play with the drill. So now I'm a dentist. 3D. Yes. I mean, male detected. I think, you know, I think the aspect of the economy that this is going to kind of actually

impact that no one's talking about is the Indian aunties are doing matchmaking, right? If like the doctor is no longer like a discreet signifier in the metric of an eligible bachelor, like what the fuck are you meant to do? You're going to, a lot of people are going to be able to. This man is a YouTuber. He has many subscribers. Well, look, this is actually, I'm very happy. Well, no, I would have been happy in an alternative world where I was single because of all the

times when I was rejected for, no, no, what I mean is that when I was rejected on the account of being a silly media person, right, and I wasn't like a doctor, like my cousins, well, fuck them. Right? Fuck them to hell. I'm going to add another layer to our sign that says like oil warehouse, derivatives trading house. General hospital.

Yeah. And I can be doctor house fast like my dream. I actually wanted, I wanted to be like doctor house when I was a teenager. We're all good. Now I get to be, everyone gets to be doctor house, we get to be a doctor who's rude. I think we should follow this through like I've got fucking two thirds of a law degree. I'm a barrister now. You're a dentist.

Yeah. I'm a CEO. Yeah. You can be, yeah, you can be doctor house in the sense that you have a medical degree you printed off at your house, come to my house and I'll do surgery on you. All of you to assume someone has a house. Yeah. That's very true.

It's just like so many things, right? This is just a return to like Victorian and pre Victorian times when your barber could be like, yeah, I'll cut out your kidney also, take a little off the sides and a little off the kidney. We're bringing, we're bringing back the polymath. I don't want to let a modern barber do my surgery because all they know how to do is fades. What do you get?

Are you going to put a fade on my fucking liver? They're going to put a fade on your dick out. It's going to taper like a mouse's head. The bad news is we couldn't save your father, but the good news is we did give him a fade on his liver. The good news is your father now tapers completely dead on the table, but I have like perfect Turkish heart. Yeah.

Yeah. You look like the guy from the meme. So we are just, we are now just using people, I think this happened. I think that the British government saw those memes people were doing of the good doctor and we're like, we have enough neurodiversity people in Britain, let's let them have a surgery. Maybe we'll generate a Dewey Hauser situation. Being a doctor is when you miss gender or trans person over the course of about an hour.

And to be fair, this is what this is what the NHS actually believes. That is also going to be just another thing like, you know, you go in for heart surgery and you end up like not, well, no, that wouldn't work with it. No, because it's, no, because they're taffs. They wouldn't do anything. They would refuse to. Okay. You would come in, you would come in as part of like gender reassignment.

And you would end up with a heart surgery. You didn't need it. No, you don't know what the fate is. Well, okay. But like imagine, imagine conversely, the liberatory potential here, right? Which is that you could get a bunch of trans people suddenly going into healthcare and suddenly boom, we have, we have the only doctors, that's what I'm going to do. Yeah.

I'm just going to do that. I have to make sure I actually learn how to do the surgery instead of sick fades. But like, yeah, qualifies a surgeon and do it. Learn yourself. Like that fucking Norwegian soldier during frostbite. I feel like you're an achievement if you like do your own surgery. Yeah. Yeah.

Then you actually, you unlock the same causes belly achievement that Liz trust unlocked. You can go free boot diplomacy after you. I think, I do think it's important to say that I'm not like necessarily inheriting against like new qualifications and new routes into like vocational jobs and stuff. Right. I think that's fine. It's just obviously that's not the fucking reason they're doing it. And like there are a lot of things that are incredibly wrong with the way this is set up

right now, right? Like going into medical school, like number one, like the people who are more likely to go to do it and go somewhere like prestigious and get through it will have money and are more likely to be white or more likely to be men and all this stuff. And like that stuff should be challenged, but just obliterating the idea of that you should have training as a doctor so we can like try and just solve the NHS crisis without spending any money is very amusing. But this is the problem in and of itself, like the serious point in this is that like

the shortage of doctors isn't because like various and short, like people don't want to become doctors and they want to become YouTubers and like, you know, do sick fates. There's a shortage of doctors because you need money to train to become a doctor, right? And like you can sort of argue that maybe, you know, you can sort of like shorten those kind of the courses down like, you know, that's, I think that's a different argument. But the problem right now is that no one wants to put money into actually doing the things. None of, no one, the Tories don't want to do it, the Labour Party certainly don't want to do it.

When all the doctors we do train leave because they can earn better money in almost any other Western country. And so like you set up a medical course, that's what like vocational, right? You still got to pay for it. You still got to pay for it. And the problem is like when you've got like local colleges cutting like funding to do like electrician courses and plumbing courses and stuff, how the fuck are you going to afford to make them into doctors?

None of this makes any sense. It's not supposed to. It's supposed to just like be content for this show, but like, yeah, well, it's that you can, what that's what we, what we keep seeing in the Britain trying to solve its problems like by moving the pieces around the board, right? We are really trying to, we're not just rearranging the deck chairs and the Titanic. We're rearranging the deck chairs and the Titanic to try to stop it sinking. Like, yeah, that's essentially what we're, and it's the same thing with the new, the

new, most of the last thing we'll talk about, but the same thing with the new mortgage rules or new mortgage that was announced for the skipped in building society, allowing people now to take out 100% mortgages. It's never been tried before and it's never gone wrong before. It's never been, it's never been tried since 2007. Oh no. It's totally wrong. It's totally wrong.

We said something about it, but it wasn't really paying attention. Yeah. We were too focused on the fact that she was in the bath. God damn you, Adam McKay. So the vibe of this one is like, it's very difficult for people to save money to get a deposit on a mortgage, which is true. We're going to solve the need for them to do that by just having them sort of bet everything on interest rates not going up, which they're going to do.

So depending on when you buy a house, think of it a bit like a spin of a roulette wheel. If you buy a house in sort of before the everything bubble started in the early 2000s, then what you have done is you have effectively found a broken roulette wheel that always pays out. If you buy a house after the everything bubble, like sort of between sort of 2008 and COVID, then you're sort of betting on like red or black basically when you're covering zero, right? You're doing pretty well. And also the roulette wheel is still broken.

You still make money in the end. Weirdly extended roulette massifol. But what 100% mortgage is at a time of high and rising interest rates, because like in the UK, just a brief aside, I think it's worth saying this, in the UK, the Bank of England's mandate to fight inflation is just no matter what. But when that mandate was set up, they imagined that inflation could only come from under investment, not a supply chain crisis, right? And so they're basically trying to, they're trying to use a tool that works when the economy

is too good because there's a supply chain crisis and these weak things keep crashing into one another. And it's why like Jerome Powell in effect has, one of the things is he's been able to actually like kind of get US inflation down by like a combination of things like raising interest rates, but also like not so many things in the US are dependent on gas prices. Whereas in the UK, food prices are also directly correlated with gas prices because electricity is so expensive and so much of our shit has grown in greenhouses. It's insane.

Like it's a direct one-to-one relationship. So food price inflation is just energy prices, but with a Scooby-Doo mask on basically. And the reason electricity prices are so high is that we have an insane system of energy pricing where it's called merit order marginal pricing where, and this is going to like really bake your noodle, the price of electricity is set by the price of the least carbon efficient electricity generation medium. So that means if the price of natural gas goes up, the price of wind goes up to match it to incentivize more wind investment, which means that right now all the wind that we

built has created huge windfalls for the people who built it because they sell their power as though they're generating it from gas. Oh, great. So what you're saying is... I really like the windfall pun. That's really funny. That was very clever. I didn't actually make it on purpose.

So what you're saying is get one of these 100% mortgages and give a bank all of your money. That is financial advice. Yes. Take out one of these 100% mortgages on a wind farm. That actually is a pretty good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be right.

You got to play the cards you're dealt here. Yeah. Diversify your portfolio. Then use that house. Use the first floor as like an operating theater and the second floor as a legal office. Both floors are also a barber. The lawyer is also a barber. There's a downstairs barber and an upstairs barber.

Yeah. Yeah. Podcasting studio at the top of the wind turbine. That's right. Also a barber. Also a barber. The branding of this makes me very angry though because the idea is essentially you're going to take all of these people's money and new houses back, the moment interest rates go

up again, which they will do very shortly. But the branding of this is like, aren't we kind for like helping people to get on the housing ladder? Yeah. Well, you know why they're doing it, right? Is they're doing it because A, in order to try to solve the known in Britain has anywhere to live problem, again, rather than just doing the thing that will work but is ideologically unpalatable, we're just continuing to rearrange the debtors and the Titanic being like, what

if this exact market credit setup solves the problem? And so by loosening all the, a lot of rules on what kinds of mortgages people can get, all it took was skipped in building society saying, hey, wait a minute, I noticed that in a difficult housing market applications are down. So maybe what we should do is just bring more borrowers in so we can keep, we can be the first movers on this very dangerous product, get a lot of people borrowing from us and then we're just going to get a lot of customers and then if interest rates go up, which if our energy prices don't fall, they probably will, then these people are going to be stuck

in negative equity after two years, basically. And what it essentially means is, yeah, it's that the people on the precipice of being able to get onto the housing ladder, they've been welcomed onto the ladder, but the step that they've been put on is it's been eaten by termites, essentially. And so it once again, it's like the, the shit rolls downhill, right? Like the, this new innovation is going to just dangles hope in front of people and for some people it might work, but a lot of other people are probably going to get fucked. Shit rolls down the spiral staircase of my wind turbine, which I've recently purchased.

This is very funny. And I'm warding it over all I survey. One expert talked to about this, said the lenders were interested in volume rather than quality, but noted the world is different than it was in 2007. It's worse. And this will work so long as 100% loan value mortgages are quote, always underwritten sensibly, which I remember was the thing that saved us in 2007 from having an era defining recession. Yeah.

Exactly. I just think we should go back to strippers buying four or five investment properties in South Florida. I think it's time. Yeah. I did. It was a documentary. Anyway, that's enough about not hospitality.

I want to talk about hospitality. So I can't imagine the Ivy House necessarily making investments in this level of automation as an early mover. But in the US and among like lots of quick service restaurant chains in the UK as well, there is, as we remembered in, we've talked about in this show before, right, like every recession jobs get like labor gets replaced by capital and jobs don't come back. The emblem of the last recession is the kiosks and McDonald's. So now another wave of that is coming.

Oh, what's going to be replaced by a kiosk now? Yeah. Well, oh no, is it podcasters? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Choose your own riff. Like it's like a soundboard. Yeah. I'll have the Starmer impression of reference to a new savory vape flavor.

Oh, yeah. Well, I was in Italy, I thought of a new savory vape flavor. Which is Ropron and pistachio. Oh, it's really good. No, you can't have fish in a vape, that's just perverse. The fish vape suffuses your lungs. I think you get like a smoked salmon vape, I think that could be nice. This is what gives you like the Innsmouth look.

You can't have a fish vape. Anyway, anyway, so what we're looking at in the States, of course, is that new wave of AI, quote unquote, enabled automation. And I think this is like the idea that the hospitality jobs are about to be under fire again, underscores the importance of actually organizing some of these people. Yeah, fully. I mean, like to be a wanker about it for a minute, like what we're seeing in hospitality is kind of what happened to like production in the States in particular, like about a

hundred years ago, right? So you had like the Taylorization of Labor, which is kind of like splitting up like jobs into like quite discreet, quote unquote, de-scaled bits of work. And then like forwardism, which kind of arranges that into like an assembly line. And it's been quite difficult until relatively recently to like be able to do that in customer service, right? Because it relies so much on having like a human face because people are really fucking lonely.

And so they actually, people go to McDonald's to talk to people a lot of the time, right? Or to get into like fistfights. Both equal forms of social interaction, you know? Yeah, definitely, right? I mean, like the class empowers itself as it sees fit. But we see like this kind of onset of automation, like it's already, it's already been the case for quite a while. So you've got the kiosks and stuff at like McDonald's, but you've also got like the

behind the scenes automation, Greg's, for example, uses an automated like key performance indicator where like staff have to put in certain inputs. And if there's not like certain outcomes met, you get automatically get like a strike that has an impact on like your job security, on how you're disciplined. So that automation in the background has already been happening. So in lots of ways, it's not new. And like you can see like the encroachment, even of like CCTV cameras and surveillance like in hospitality sites has been coming down the road for a long time.

So like, I think this kind of, what we're talking about here, I can't remember the name of the AI thing. What's, what's it called? So what we're talking about, the example of AI is White Castle in the state is introducing, has introduced several machines that are rolling out to more stores. Flippy 2. Flippy 2. Flippy 2.

Well, it flips the burgers. Right. Okay. Yeah. And then Julia, which takes and processes orders. It's less descriptive than Flippy 2. There's a sort of a cultural input here because like Harold and Kumar can't get served by Flippy 2 and Julia.

That's, it really undercuts the whole movie. Well, cause they only went to White Castle cause they were lonely. Yeah. Well, basically, yeah. That was what happened for a fist fight. They did get, they did get into a fight at the White Castle kind of. Yeah. Actually proud to be British.

Amar, you were saying? I don't know. My brain's gone a different place now. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that like, it's obviously like quote unquote scary to see like that onset of automation even further in hospitality. But hospitality is already like incredibly precarious, right? Like the vast majority of people in hospitality, like we'll never have signed a contract. They'll be on de facto zero hours contracts, like employees routinely violate employment

law, often like without even knowing about it, right? And so like when you start like trying to organize within your own workplace or talk to other workers in the hospitality industry, like when we started like teaching ourselves employment law, we were quite shocked by what we found about just the level of shit that was just straight up illegal that we had absolutely no idea about, right? And alongside that, it's also the fact that like a lot of people working in hospitality, like a like most of us don't see it as a career, right? Like I'm going to be working like my last shift at the pub, like RIP, I'm going to miss

it so much. Like I do actually really enjoy the work. But like the truth is for a lot of people, that's not the vocation, right? The goal isn't to stay in hospitality forever. But so in the short term, while people are doing that, while they're going to become like really famous musicians or like really well paid screenwriters or like really successful guys doing podcasts, like there's a lot of us will like happily trade in like that alcohol that you can either steal or like some supervisors or managers will give to

you the coke that the security guards will like confiscate and dish out to you. Like people will like happily take that as like a fine trade off for like secure employment and good pay. Because the minute you try to get people to start like organizing around the workplace, in lots of cases it feels like an acceptance that like, oh shit, like this is actually like a defining part of what I do and who I am. It's no side hustle anymore. And you know, it's all of these things I think are happening as we say in the face of another

automation wave. And I think this, so this article from QSR, so again, I sometimes like to say sort of how I sort of look at stuff, you read trade publications and there's most weird stuff gets written. This is from quick service restaurant quarterly. Oh, I love that. I always pick it up when I'm having a long train ride. Yeah, yeah.

Well, they do good quizzes. They do. The crossword in there is fantastic. So, roughly three years ago, the venerable brand began exploring two initiatives better suited to the Jetsons than a fast food original player. Oh, is it divorce? One was what's become a highly publicized partnership with Miso Robotics and Flippy 2, which essentially takes over the fire station.

The other was the deal with MasterCard that drives through AI, Julia, which takes and processes orders with customers every time they cross a loop detector. Also it's weird, they gave the FryCook a male gendered name Flippy 2, but the order process is a female gender named Julia. It's curious, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, because it's got to be sexy when you're having a order taken. You don't want a robot dude.

What are you, gay? I don't want it. Not even AI can escape the gender division of labor, unfortunately. No, absolutely not. So, Susan Carol Boser, White Castle CIO, had an idea. AI and Robotics aren't there to replace hospitality, rather tools designed to amplify guest satisfaction for a new age of running restaurants and quote, create memories. Uh-huh.

I mean, I guess any activity technically creates memories apart from, like, doing GHB. Really? Like, sleepiness. In this case, predictable memories, like, no one will, like, Jenny will never go, like, the extra mile for you or, like, be kind to you or nice to you in a way that, like, an actual human mind. Jenny will never be... Yeah, it is Julia.

Julia will never be impressed, but you got really high, went on a very long road trip, rode a cheetah who was also high, did surgery, did surgery on a guy, without being a doctor, it all comes back. Did surgery. It was legal. It was in the UK. Have sex with someone else's wife. You know, Julia won't appreciate that, right?

And I feel like that's what the magic's really got in all of this. And this is, I think, is the net graph of the article, but White Castle was drawn to this technology for reasons touted by industry peers. Let's call it what it is. He says, we are struggling to get enough labor on the floor, so Julia is not taking a job from anyone. But that really means, right, is that this is... You're not paying enough to keep labor.

Yeah. Yeah, obviously. I mean, it's so fucking laughable, isn't it? Like, obviously, it's not that there are not jobs. It's that you're not fucking paying people like a living wage, right? Like, everyone is on poverty wages. And in particular, I think what's interesting is that so many people, a lot of people are putting this down to, like, furlough, right?

Putting down to the fact that, like, people have been furloughed and then realized, actually, like, fuck this shit, like, I deserve a better quality of life. The truth is, actually, for a lot of hospitality workers, people didn't get furloughed in loads of cases, right? Like, some of the workers that I was organizing with, like, during the pandemic, which is when we set up, like, South London Bartender's Network, they were designated freelance workers, precisely so the company could get out of, like, doing furlough, because they would have incurred costs through doing that, right?

With, like, NI payments and whatever. And, like, similarly, like, loads of people who were working in hospitality at the time, like, suddenly their payslips were changed, so, like, extant holiday pay wasn't calculated. So I think there is, like, a kind of, like, in some sense, there is a shift that people are, like, actually, we can't, we're not putting up with this anymore. But I think it's more material, I think it's more that actually, like, so many people are so much worse off that, like, going to work and earning, like, £8.40 an hour, like I did in my first bar job, for example, like, just simply, like, doesn't pay and people aren't

going to, like, sacrifice every ounce of dignity, like, serving a fucking hamburger to a car in, right? Yeah. And I didn't know what, like, I didn't know what kind of hospitality and, like, pubs and restaurants are, but I know of, like, friends who kind of have similar situations in, like, different places where they kind of, in jobs where, like, maybe a decade ago, they would have been taken on as, like, a member of staff or at least, like, someone with a contract, like their contracts, like, so all their sort of agreements changed to become freelancers.

And as, like, and as those agreements changed, also the demands placed on them would increase as part of, like, the right to sort of work there, right? So in the case of, like, working in a gym, for example, they went from kind of being, like, personal trainers or, like, people who kind of just worked on the, on, like, the floors of the gym to, oh, if you actually want the right to work here, you have to sort of take on duties that were the duties of cleaning staff who they let go in part or they've cut down quite a lot. And I wondered whether, like, is it a similar...

You've got to be a gym surgeon now as well. Exactly, yeah. So is it, like, a similar situation there where it's just, like, you know, you're not only sort of, like, on precarious conditions to begin with, but you almost have, like, for the right to actually earn a measly, like, income, you end up having to take on more responsibilities, literally because you're sort of coerced into doing it. I mean, I think that is true, but, like, I also don't think it's new, right? So, like, back when, I think it was, like, 2017, 2018, there was the McStrike campaign,

right? Which, like, I wasn't involved in, but I was kind of peripherally involved in, because we went on strike at a similar time. And when I was talking to, like, other young hospitality workers, like Greg's workers, TGI Friday's workers, McDonald's workers, like, Weatherspoon's workers, like, everyone was saying the same thing, which is that, like, no one was paid quite enough to actually live on. Everyone was expected, last minute, to take on shifts that they shouldn't have.

Everyone was expected, if necessary, to work, you know, in a lot of cases, more than the European working time directive without signing an opt-out, which was illegal. But the reason that they could rely on that is, basically, solidarity in the workplace, right? Like, you would step up for your co-worker if they really couldn't do something, if they were ill, rather than having, like, a well-staffed, like, front-of-house, for example. So, like, it's kind of always been that way in lots of ways. My, really quickly, my question also is, like, in terms of new shit, what about both Brexit

and COVID, a thing that we did to ourselves, and then, like, just dumb luck that, like, service workers were more exposed to than pretty much anyone? Yeah, and I mean, that's kind of why, like, our organizing, like, you know, which we'd been in South London, we've been talking about the idea for a while, but it really, it had to happen during the pandemic, because, like, we suddenly realised that we were, like, at risk. And there are cases, you know, that I know and that I was working with, of people who, like, couldn't see their families for six months, because they hadn't been furloughed,

and the places they were working at, in particular, this was true of breweries, said, okay, well, we can't put you on the bar, but we are going to give you some hours working, because you're freelance, where you can either be, like, canning beers, or you can be, like, on a bike, or, like, on a scooter, delivering them. And there wasn't any kind of promise of a number of hours that people would be working for that. It certainly wasn't matching up to the actual wages that they would have been owed through though.

But it did mean that people couldn't see their families for six months. There was an intensification of surveillance that went alongside that. So when stuff started to open up as well, when some places actually had more staff than they needed, doing shorter hours, they were able just to get rid of a whole load of people either through disciplining them, or just because they were on zero hours, they'd never been promised anything in the first place. What's really interesting, though, since, kind of, like, you know, Brexit and, like, the pandemic, is that the hospitality sector is struggling for, like, other reasons anyway,

right? The increase in, like, energy prices and supply chain stuff is having, you probably will have noticed this, right? Like, it's becoming more common to find a six-pound pint of beer in just, like, a regular pub, right? And that's because brewing is, like, a really energy-intensive process, right? But when people say that that's the reason why we can't pay more than this, we can only pay you a certain amount, that's what people are saying before the energy crisis, or that's

what people are saying before the pandemic, that's what they said before Brexit. Like, there's never been a time where people have been like, oh, you know what, actually, now we can pay you a living wage. And the funny thing is about living wage is that, going back to White Castle, which, I'm aware we're having a transatlantic comparative discussion, but these dynamics are similar, even if there is less capital investment in the UK because the government seems to actively discourage its own ideology, is that, so, Flippi 2 is offered as a robot as a service subscription model.

So just like employment as a human as a service subscription model, Flippi 2, which, yeah, isn't it fun? So it's $3,000 a month, which, again, like, that's, and they say, yes, that's more than you'd have to pay someone on $15 an hour, but you can stay open for longer. It doesn't organize, it doesn't complain, it certainly doesn't unionize, like... Precisely. Yeah, exactly. I mean, what they're actually fighting against there is the fact that, if you treat your

workers like shit, we will take stuff back, right? So like, before I worked at the Ivy House, when I was working at, like, quite a shitty bar in Brixton, like, they paid us so little, they treated us like absolute scum, and it was like, it's the closest thing I've done to, like, physical labor. I was a bar back, and the absence of an E is very important there. I was a bar back, and I would have to, like, you know, like, carry crates and crates of beer, be changing kegs, that was like, fight, there was like a club, four bars and several food carts, like, on one site.

And so, what I would do is just steal, like, as much booze as I could, and like, even like, go in and like, steal chips as they were making them, right, for customers, because that's what you do. Like, Julia is not going to do that shit. That's our right action, baby. Yeah, no. Interestingly, right? Once you get QSR Magazine, it's not quarterly, it's monthly, QSR Magazine addresses this

directly as well, saying one of the other advantages is that you can control portion sizes centrally, and what's implied there is no one's going to grab a little burger when they're hungry, because Julia and Flippy, too, don't need, don't have any, don't have any kind of human desires. They are automatable. Well, they've seen that tweet of the guy I used to work at McDonald's, who was like, I'll level with you whenever someone ordered 20 nuggets, I was not counting that shit, I was stuffing as many in there as would fit in the box.

And that is solidarity. And the other thing here, right, is that hospitality employment, generally speaking, the way it's structured, is that it is a combination of customer interaction, but also, as we've been talking about, actually making the thing, carrying the thing, you have to start and stop many different tasks at once. And one of the things that these people are touting as a solution to this from Julia and Flippy is that you never have to take an order, go make the drink, give the person the drink, et cetera, et cetera, which allows for a higher throughput of orders.

But what that means, right, is remember, when we talk, when we look back at something like the steam loom, right? I'm always looking at the steam loom. I love looking at the steam loom. One of our favourites ever since, yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're not looking at it, you're not going to be able to tell the children where to put their hands in to get the stuff out of it.

It's a grind for this view, and the view is a steam loom. Yeah, this is the trash future steam looming manufacturer. Also, doctor's office, EdFT, EdFT storage warehouse. The steam from the loom powers the wind turbine, right? Getting a cigarette off of a jet of steam. Yeah. People talk about going to the hairdresser for a weave, but not in the way that weave comes out.

That's an efficient way, you know, instead of doing a hot towel, you could go into the steam room, but also, I'd just be careful because someone might be doing surgery in there. Yeah. So anyway, but we think about the steam loom, right? One of the things that drove the Industrial Revolution, which kicked off a lot of these processes that are currently drowning the world in a toxic gas, was the fact, well, yes, it was the fact that once you improve the throughput of one part of the production line, that every

other part of the whole value chain has to improve to catch up, including things like logistics. And so, all of a sudden, you invent the steam loom. It becomes necessary to massively improve your efficiency of, say, picking and shipping cotton, of processing it, of creating the shirts, and so on and so on. These logics are self-reinforcing, and they say outright, one of the great things about Julia is that she never stops taking orders ever, which can massively intensify either the work that the humans are going to have to do in the White Castle, or it's going

to basically make it necessary to replace them all with flippies. Yeah, exactly. And this is something that I've seen in the past, talking to Greg's work, is where the way that a lot of these systems work is that they will work by the most productive rate at which things can be done, right? So what was happening in Greg's is, workers are being effectively punished because if they managed to do all of the tasks they had to do at the insane rate and the understaffing at which they were told to do it, and this includes, for example, when Greg started opening

earlier, so you had two runs of breakfast, right? You had to double the amount of food, but you kind of were doing it with less staff. If you managed to do that once, that then became the norm that you were expected to uphold, and if you failed to do that, then that was one strike against you. So it's a direct strategy of trying to increase precarity, as a very psychological thing as well as much as a material problem. And so if you look at this as a whole, right, and again, not specifically about White Castle, but about the way the hospitality industry works, and specifically how it uses technology,

it is all behind all of the AI, the shiny promises of AI that talk of the Jetsons future, what actually you're looking at is increased surveillance and control, increased precarization, even though what they always say, they always say this, and the article actually talks out of both sides of its mouth, right? It says, oh, we're not trying to lose anybody, in fact, we can't hire enough people, we just don't want to pay them more. What we're going to do is redeploy everyone, so that they can be creating memories with the customers of White Castle.

But what memory, like, have you been to a McDonald's, like, where they do the mission, like, the staff are just kind of stopping people fighting and cleaning sick, and like, that's it. But I mean, that's... Better memory, yeah, I suppose, yeah. I mean, if you have, if you see like a pretty sick fight, Kevin, you're being redeployed to jack off the customers, trying to create memories there. Right, so, in fact, right, sorry, it's creating memorable moments, sorry, is what it's called.

But they say, right, they say, in a lot of its stores, White Castle has gone from having two employees because its fire line is split, sandwich goes one way, sides go another, so now we're all food heads in the same direction, then they take that second employee and repurpose them, quote unquote. Say, get them in a window to help make a favorable impression, but White Castle's fryer has now become a bottleneck. You have to be an octopus to run the thing, or you just have to be flippy, too, now. But the other thing is, what's happening in America, and also in the UK, actually, as

well, is do you know what the social service of Last Resort is? Fast food restaurants. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, this is completely true. But it's also true of like, you know, like, and this is quite specifically more British thing, like pubs, right, like pubs are some of the few spaces that people can access as like social spaces, right? Like there's a real sense that like the pub is like a great British institution that is

also like doing God's work, whereas previously people might go to like, you know, churches, for example, like with the decline of like organized religion, like in Britain to a great extent, like pubs sort of weirdly fulfill that function, right? And so I think it's interesting that they're talking about redeploying people to more front facing roles, because the truth is that whether you're working in fast food or you're working in like pubs or bars, a big part of the work that you have to do is actually like conflict de-escalation, right? Like, I've been working in hospitality sites when people have come with like concealed

weapons, I've been working when there's been domestic violence incidents, I've been working when police have come, I've been working when there's been sexual assault, I've been working when like, people have been like, getting into fistfights, my colleagues have been working when there's been stabbings, like de-escalation is such a massive part of what we do, but it's not in any job description, right? When you're applying for a job at a bar, no one says, do you know how to de-escalate? Do you know? Yeah, no one's like doing like he fat training or like, you know, showing you how to like

do a tour, like use a tourniquet and stuff. No, exactly, right? Well, they should, like, you know, like I've seen some like, when we had the old place and like, when we were in the old place in Whitechapel, the pub like, everyone knows, you know, the pub. Oh, the Giza pub, yeah. No, I remember like, they had like fucking like, glass bottle fight in the middle of the day, and like, one of the guys who worked at the pub had to come out and like, cover

the wound until the ambulance came. You fully need the like, thin blue line flags that cops have, but it's a bar instead of a thin blue line, because like, there's more entitlement to, for sure, like. The thin mahogany line. The thin mahogany line. Order and chaos, you know? Yeah. I mean, yeah, oftentimes that is the bartender, right?

How the bartender responds to something can either lead to something escalating with like, fatal consequences or not, right? Yeah. Yeah, I do sometimes think that like, whenever people like, whenever there's like a social problem in this country, and the immediate answer is, call in the army. It's like, no, you should just like, call in like, pub workers, people work at McDonald's and stuff. They'd probably like, be better at, they would be better at doing it and managing it.

Like, yeah. Well, I mean, that's, I think it's really important point, right? Like, because what you've, what you've, I like it on there is that like, there are so many like, kind of hidden skills, I suppose, that you have to utilize in hospitality from like management to like, de-escalation, all of this stuff that actually means that hospitality workers, while being in one of the worst sectors for union organizing, potentially some of the best place to actually do that organizing work, right? Like, we've already spent, I don't know how long I've spent like, counseling people through

divorces and bereavements and like, difficult relationships and like, you know, talking to people about their own problems, like. We're sorry about the pre-show chat, you know, it's, it can be a bit of a down. Yeah. Well, in fact, this is in, in your own writing, you've described this as leaving White Castle behind for a sec. You've described this as being a kind of Avon lady for socialism behind the bar, as it's kind of, that's the organizing potential.

Oh, it's a pyramid scheme. Oh yeah, of course, of course. I should say actually, so like that, that piece of referencing, which is from like notes from below, was collectively written by about 30 bartenders, right? So I can't personally take, claim that one. But yeah, one of my comrades who's like, had been working in hospitality for a long time was like, one of the difficulties of trying to unionize hospitality workers is that if every time you go for a post-work piss up, you're trying to talk to someone about a union,

you do become the Avon lady for socialism and you kind of come across as a bit weird. But I think that's why like the, the, the reason that kind of we were able to get off the ground with organizing is came out of the fact that we were working in the pub at the time, right? Like you can't really have, I don't think, an effective model where you get external organizers coming into pubs, try to talk to bartenders and tell them why they need to rise up, right? So my, my kind of background in this is that I was working in several horrendous hospitality

sites until I ended up working at the Ivy house, which like was so much better. Like it pays a living wage, it's a community owned pub, it's not for profit. It had unfortunately a manager who was like, not ideal and there were several allegations of bullying against this person, allegations of racism, allegations of like homophobia and all of that. And so the staff put in grievance, someone suggested a union and I don't, I think the fact that this pub is a 10 minute bus ride from Goldsmith's might be pertinent here just to bear in mind.

So people took to it, right? And so we put in grievances against, against this manager, he was suspended while under investigation and as a result of things that he'd said, while he was still under investigation, the pub moved to kind of stop, stop employing some members of staff. Now we were on zero hours contracts at this point, like, and so they weren't being fired, they were just not being offered shifts. Now we were all in a trade union, but we didn't really know what we were doing. And so what we did was we met up, we had a union meeting, we said, who wants to shut

the pub down, put our hands up, it was unanimous and we shut it down. We had a, we had a very enthusiastic but slightly terrified, amazing organizer from the Bakers Union at the time who was like, you know, this is not how you legally ballot for strike action, right? I think it's not a show of hands around a kitchen table and we were like, fuck it. And luckily, you know, we were able to trade off the fact that the pub, despite the necessary kind of antagonism within it, right, of employer and worker, is actually not an employer that we're trying to fuck us over.

Like it's a, it's a community on pub, like it's trying to do something good. And that show of force was necessary. And so it was three days. And at the end of three days, we got staff reinstated, we got fixed term contracts, we got union recognition. And this is while the pub is on a living wage. And like, this was in 2018, several years later, there is still an active union branch in the pub that continues to input on management decisions and there's a really good relationship

between staff and management because it is a strong union, right? Like when you have an issue, you don't think, fuck this, I'm going to go somewhere else. You can talk to your union who can then have an actual conversation where they represent your interests. And this is why the pub has like one of the like lowest, like one of the highest staff retention rates in the sector that I've seen, right? Like I was saying, I've been there for six years. Not very common.

But one thing that we did realize afterwards is that we didn't really know what we were doing following the strike. Like we didn't realize that we kind of done something almost historic. Like people don't take wild strike action and people don't take wildcat strike action in hospitality. And after that, the advice we were getting was, you know, the way that we were being told to operate was as if we were working in a traditional factory floor setting. It wasn't suitable for a workplace where there were 25 members of staff, lots of whom were

kind of coming and going. And so we were thinking about this and over the next like year or two, I started volunteering with some community unionism. So Peckham needs a pay rise. It was a campaign to organize like Nando's workers, KFC workers, McDonald's workers on Y Lane primarily, but also more widely around South London. And that's kind of where I started to actually like see how you could actually organize in hospitality.

You just couldn't do it through traditional trade union methods. And I was kind of casting around for like different ways that we could start to do something with this because it turns out where the bartenders drink, not the bars that they're working at. So we already, once I started to map it out, had quite a massive disperse network of bartenders across South London, just based on who drank and whose pubs, right? And it was when the pandemic hit and I was involved in mutual aid organizing, because obviously the government weren't doing shit, that some of us had the idea that maybe we could set up some kind of equivalent, mutual aid-esque bartenders network basically, because

trade unions won't take on your case if you're in dispute basically, right? They have to conserve resources. Trade unions also generally will not prioritize small transient workspaces. It's not a great use of resources, right? Because you don't get people staying, you don't get union subs continually coming in. So the idea behind it was just to do what we've kind of called like guerrilla unionism, where like we take on cases for people who are not trade union members. We do what we have to do to represent them.

We teach them about their rights. We beg, borrow and steal until we get them solicitors if necessary. We support them through like ACAS mediation procedures. And we also occasionally have been known to twist the truth a little bit. So nothing scares the shit out of an employer like going in for a start, if they try to fire someone and that person works in a pub and they say, I'm a union man and I have a rep, they don't know what the fuck's going on. If you then go in and are able to lay out all the ways in which they've contravened

the law, which every hospitality employer has in this country, then they will be like, fuck, if you just tell them whether or not you can verify it, that you have solicitors who are willing to take them to court to get maximum compensation, it's amazing how many jobs you can actually save. And that's the kind of model that we kind of pursued. I love this. I absolutely love this. I mean, like for once, the sort of like vexatious legal threat boot is on the other foot.

So let's just say you're listening to this podcast and you're working in hospitality. Let's just say you're listening to this podcast and you own a pub. Stop listening to it. Don't forget everything you've just heard. All of these threats are credible. But let's say you listen to this podcast, you're working in a pub and you are either you want to get organized or you are worried and you need some protection. How can someone get in touch to get involved?

So like this is one thing I will be honest about, right? So like South London, Barton has network started like in what year was the pandemic? Well, it started in 2020. Thank you. Yes, it did. It started in 2020. And so it's kind of gone through phases of being like incredibly active and we've done some like absolutely fucking mental stuff in that time and some phases of being less

active, right? Because none of us are like paid organizers, like we are mainly people who work in hospitality. But we've also been like, you know, talking to like trade unions and working with trade unions and talking to like workers as they need help. One funny thing that has happened is that someone who I will not name and is definitely not me has forgotten the password to the social media stuff. So if you just DM me like on Twitter, I'm sure these fine folk will like tag me. You can literally just DM me and we can kind of take it from there.

But the idea is to basically help spread these autonomous networks, right? And one really important thing is that like the fact that this network has like waxed and waned and waxed again, the fact that sometimes we've been organizing seasonal workplaces on the South Bank and gone from having one union member to having a seasonal workplace in the South Bank, giving guarantee offer of repeat fixed term contracts to its staff, right? Like we did that in I think like a month and a half. Like the stuff that you can do once you have the workforce on board is absolutely incredible. But like we can only support you to do that, right?

You already have the tools if you're working behind a bar to organize, you do it all the fucking time. We can support you through that basically. Okay, well, that Twitter at will certainly be in the show notes. So if you don't, if you are listening to this and don't have a Twitter, sorry, sorry, so little of it makes sense, but I'm sorry you're getting fired and there's nothing we can do. If you're not on Twitter and you're listening to the show, how?

Yeah. I mean, I know a great slister who works in a steam room. Yeah, sorry, he's got an NVQ in the wall. Steam room centered around a steam loom. I think that's also a good place, as good a place as any to end it. So I say, Amar, thank you so much for coming in today. It's been an absolute delight, Angel. Thank you both.

All. Indeed. And thank you for listening and don't forget, there is a Patreon, it is $5 a month. You can subscribe to it and get a second show every week. You can't unionize. That's the cost of the Patreon. Take it or leave it. I'm actually here to unionize Trustfeature.

Finally, for too long I've been oppressed by these people. Wait, you guys get unionized against who? Or are you getting like the patrons to unionize against us? In which case? In which case? Please don't do that. Okay, there's a Patreon, there's $5 a month, there's $10 if you want to get a second Britonology and writtenology episode.

Episodes where Nate and Milo talk about Britain or Alice and I talk about books. The two genders. That's right. Britain and books. There is also a stream. It is Monday and Thursday evenings, most of the time. It runs from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. U.K. time. Breast join?

Yeah. The theme song is Here We Go by Jinseng. Listen to it on Spotify. Milo, do you have anything? Yeah, I'm on tour in general doing previews. Oh yeah, we're still on tour when this comes out. Yeah, we will. This is coming out on Tuesday morning.

So if you're in Manchester, maybe there will be tickets. Manchester is the biggest venue. But Glasgow was the biggest venue. No, Manchester is slightly bigger. Glasgow is the silliest-sized venue because Manchester is a bigger city. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Come see us in Manchester or Glasgow, come see Milo. First of June, I'm in Bath.

That's on my... Sorry. Yeah, it should be fun. Come see that. I'm going to be in Manchester, actually, on the 11th of June. I think the 11th. Yeah, I'm going to be doing a new show in Manchester. There's going to be a bunch of just go-on-my-lives sites.

There will be tour dates. I don't know them yet. And don't forget, you have to come see us in Glasgow because we're only in the ridiculous venue we're in because we refuse to share a stage with Joanna Cherry. You're working... I'm sorry for booking her as the guest. Give us the fruits of winning the cancel culture fight and please come and see us in Glasgow because I live here and I will be very sad if we don't sell out a venue where I live.

That's right. So with all that being said, we will see you on the bonus in a couple of days. Bye, everybody. Okay. Bye.