Scores of police were drafted in to protect Philip Green’s profits at the last Topshop protest. Despite this he does everything he can to get out of paying tax. And they call benefit claimants scroungers.
The United Voices of the World Union (UVW) are reporting that a Topshop cleaner has been sacked in advance of national protests demanding the company pay their cleaners a real living wage.
According to UVW:
“Carolina (see picture), one of the “Topshop Two”, who is a single mother from Ecuador, has just been SACKED by Topshop’s union busting contractor Britannia Services Group. Her only crime was to join a union and protest her poverty wages.
In other words as Philip Green buys another £100 million yacht, one of his cleaners is sacked for asking for a living wage of £9.40 per hour.
Carolina and her colleague Susana, who together make up the Topshop Two, were both previously suspended. Susana remains suspended.”
At least 17 towns and cities in the UK and Ireland will hold demonstrations against Topshop this Saturday (14th May 16) as part of a long-running and militant campaign against the poverty wages and appalling conditions suffered by their cleaners. In London protesters will head to their flagship store at Oxford Circus where despite the cost of living in the capital cleaners are paid little more than the minimum wage. Topshop are owned by vile tax-avoiding billionaire Philip Green.
Astonishingly Top Shop have tried to avoid responsibility for their cleaner’s pay by insisting it is nothing to do with them and they contract out the cleaning services. Cleaners at the company are technically employed by Britannia Services Group, a company run by David Shaw. Yet in 2010 Britannia lost an Employment Tribunal hearing after sacking a shop cleaner on the apparent insistence of Arcadia – Top Shop’s parent company. The cleaner had denied allegations by Arcadia that she had engaged in abusive behaviour whilst working at the company’s Outfit Clothing Store, but she was sacked anyway. The tribunal found that Britannia acted unreasonably due to not asking Arcadia to reconsider their position after receiving the cleaner’s denial of the allegations against her.
It appears that Arcadia don’t want to take responsibility for their cleaner’s grievances, but are quite happy to put pressure on their contractors to sack people when it suits them. Whether Arcadia have used similar pressure in the recent sacking is unknown. Whatever the truth, if Topshop won’t pay their cleaners properly than let’s make make Topshop pay some other way.
Join the protests on Saturday 14th May and let’s start holding vile parasites like Philip Green to account. In London meet outside Topshop in Oxford Circus from 5pm. Demonstrations are also due to be held outside the store’s branches in Liverpool, Dundee, Edinburgh, Dublin, Loughborough, Norwich, Belfast, Bristol, Sheffield, Nottingham, Taunton, Birmingham, Gloucester, Plymouth, Glasgow and Cambridge.
Please help spread the word and it’s not too late to orgainise a local protest. This Saturday’s events are also supported by Class War, the Baker’s Food And Allied Worker’s Union and many more.
If you can’t make a protest (or if you can) UVW are asking people to tweet using hashtags #topshopstyle and #boycotttopshop. You can also sign the petition.
For all the latest details visit the facebook page for Saturday’s protest.
Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid
the void 
Bastards, protect the rich, screw the poor, that’s all this bloody country’s about!
Reblogged this on disabledsingleparent.
So much for difference between the legal Minimum Wage, and the actual Living Wage.
Not the re-branded Minimum Wage touted by the Tories as the same thing.
It isn’t, and we can see what happens when people try to get a genuine Living Wage.
And for many this will be the future, in a low-pay , zero-hours workforce.
Reblogged this on sdbast.
Typical ultra capitalist companies (Top Shop & Britannia Services Group) who screw their workforce. These bastard companies have no shame as they take all the profits they can get away with whilst at the same time sack any worker who simply asks for a living wage. Yet another disgusting example of the unfair British labour market.
Why the hell doesn’t the workers in this country get off their fucking knees and fight back against this exploitation?
Weasel cheese paring prick Green needs to understand his coffin and grave will be the same size as poor he’s trodden on for years. Everyone. Boycott all the group shops for 6 months. Hit the sleazy cretin in the wallet. See the nob jockeys scatter. I feel so sorry for those in London unable to survive on poverty pay zero hours and stacked rents. Tax avoidance by these ‘magnets’ should mean passport removal, sequestration of all assets UK and abroad and public flogging on conviction if deny wrongdoings, put assets in others names. Should be ashamed of himself.
Cameron’s ‘long term economic plan’ is still working – evictions are happening hand over fist and the Country is officially now ‘back in recession’ (but not according to Mark Carney, head of Bank of England)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/twice-as-many-private-renters-being-evicted-than-when-david-cameron-first-came-to-power-a7026556.html
Fuck IDS and Fuck his continuing quest for all consuming POWER.
This is a man when intelligence and genuine human empathy was first handed out by his bastard parents, then he did not see see any of it.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-treasury-is-the-worst-thing-in-britain-and-should-be-broken-up-says-iain-duncan-smith-a7026151.html
“Tories withheld key documents from the election fraud investigation Electoral Commission says”.
And Cameron is heading a ‘2016 summit’ on other Countries corruption!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-election-fraud-electoral-commission-probe-investigation-criminal-police-a7026141.html
Surely what TOPSHOP and its contractors are doing here is illegal. You can’t, or shouldn’t be allowed to fire folks simply for asking for a pay rise. Considering the guy behind TOPSHOP has money enough to buy a handful of fancy boats.
Hopefully, however, the guy with the big posh boats won’t be having them too long. Nor his “Knighthood”. We hope it is all taken off him pretty soon.
If he goes away in a huff….he can always go away to Monaco with his damsel. But had this been Iceland, he would be going away to a jail. But GB don’t put corrupt bosses in jail, even the ones who steal billions. They only do that to the peasants who got 20.00 for washing their neighbor’s windows or something like that.
So much for HogBoy Cameron going on about corrupt governments to the Queen of England!!
What’s the point of a protest?
It doesn’t even get press coverage.
The protests against poverty and “gentrification in London” didn’t even make the back pages of the papers. And the BBC and ITV bulletins are more concerned about singing dogs and X factor than they were about the protests. You know that these are controlled by the government.
If you REALLY want to teach the likes of Cameron and Sir Philip Green a lesson firstly let’s rekindle the true spirit of London 2012 and show the torch to Topshop and secondly scupper their money laundering dreams by voting to leave the slave labour exploiting EU.
Spirit of 2012 – Protest lifted the working classes out of living in slums and working a 18 hour day for peanuts over a hundred years ago. Equally, protest got women the vote.
The press and media have always been in the pockets of governments and big business interest groups, yet I will still protest over getting social justice for the victims of state violence and murder just like those families did in Liverpool who fought for 27 years against the full might of the state over the Hillsborough disaster.
FUCK STATE CONTROL BEFORE IT FUCKS YOU UP!!!
Reblogged this on Wessex Solidarity and commented:
Picket your local top shop
To Santa Hates You..
Are you sure it was protest that lifted the working classes out of living in slums etc.? (some people are still in slums btw)
There were other factors involved like the advent of WW1 and the concepts and of Karl Marx were being put into action in Russia. Remember Marx predicted that the most likely country to have a revolution was Britain.
The establishment and ruling classes feared a revolution so gave minor concessions to the working class slave workforce here.
Remember too that why Africans slaves were rarely used in Britain except as decorations (page boys that sort of thing) because they already had a docile and compliant slave workforce in place.. a left over and transition from serfdom known as the “working class” Often the conditions were worse than many of the African slaves in the United states.
OK slavery as a business may have been abolished in the early 19th century but the working slave class in the UK lived on.
Mr Cameron and co wishes England to return to Victorian values and his money and fortunes are directly due to his slave trading/owning ancestors too… look it up.
Protests may have inspired others to join in but that’s about all. Ultimately it was the threat of “direct action” and indeed violence that finally got things changed. The formation of trades unions and the rise of the original Labour party.
Ironically the modern Labour party is all for Scab workers from the Eu… make no mistake that’s what it is… utterly against the original purpose and directive of the Labour movement.
Going back to protests..
Protests really didn’t do anything,… and still don’t apart from create a convenient diversion for the ruling elites benefit. Look at the anti Iraq war march… did anyone in power take any notice and listen? Very few and those that did were overruled anyway.
The poll tax was a slightly different situation … only because of so many people refusing to pay and of course .. direct action riots.
Why are Cameron and Osbourne so keen to keep us in Europe? Can you answer that?
Getting justice for the Hillsborough families. OK so now there’s been an official verdict of “unlawful killing” Let me ask you a question: How many Police officials and officers that lied, fabricated and fraudulently misled and blamed anyone but themselves in the whole time of the inquiries will ever be taking to court or punished?
And I mean any of them.
The catalogue of criminal actions by the Police is extensive too.
What’s your answer.. don’t worry the IPCC will take of it. It’s in their hands now. Bear that in mind.
I have my answer already I’ll bet it’s smaller than yours.
Do look my earlier post and do instead show the torch to Topshop. spirit of 2012
I very much doubt that Sky News & BBC News will be mentioning this!
Good on the protesters for doing this this evening.
http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/may/14/topshop-protesters-london-demonstration-sir-philip-green-london