11 August 2016
Byronic Moments
by J R Thomas
Last week Greek yachts and Greek film makers; this week a natural progression, you may think, to Greek Romanticism and English poets? Well, no. From the sublime beauties of the Greek islands we move to London burger bars. Upmarket ones, though. Byron is the unlikely name of a burger chain, and we make no recommendation as to the Romanticism (or even the lyricism and scan) of their burgers, but ponder their sudden and unintentional eruption into the headlines.
Byron began as a single upmarket burger bar in Kensington, quickly growing into many more locations in central London where well-heeled and flat-tummed young hipsters congregate. It set out to serve high quality ingredients (meat from cheerful well-bred cows; shapely gherkins, rough sliced tomatoes). Proper Food, the blurb says, not, you note, organic or pesticide-free or local, just “Proper”. But definitely finer than the cheaper and widely available alternatives, if at more than twice the price. Their first sashay into involuntary publicity was a photograph of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, eating a takeaway Byron Burger at a late night Treasury meeting. This might or might not have been a great publicity opportunity – it probably revolted the sort of people who would not eat in Byron anyway, and pleased those who were already loyal customers – but from then on everybody knew that Byron meant burgers, not sonnets.
Whether you’re at the bottom of the food cooking and serving chain or at the top, selling food is a low-margin and fickle business. If you can fill every seat two or three times a day, every day, and keep the costs under control, you might just make some money, once you have paid for all the kitchen kit and the trendy fit-out, and if you can stay fashionable and your tables full. So keeping the costs down is absolutely key to making a return, and the biggest single cost is labour. Burger and pizza places and the like do not need highly-trained staff, they need cheap and preferably cheerful ones. For those new to the job market, energetic but unskilled, or pausing temporarily while they travel the world, kitchen or service in restaurants is an easy way of scraping a living. Tips can make the scrapings a bit more palatable, especially in trendy caffs that attract the rich and/or American tourists (used to handing out generous tips for good service and witty conversation with it).
Brits, famously, do not like waiting at table, but the newly arrived from other shores often positively welcome it. The food serving business in return welcomes them – they are hard-working, often cheerful and willing, and, cynically, easy to sack if business slows down. Those from foreign shores, though, can on occasion go to work without having gone through the proper procedures. This ranges from everything to working whilst here on a student visa (naughty) or a tourist visa (very naughty) or by virtue of having arrived by small boat on a beach in remotest Kent (strictly not allowed). The Home Office has for long tried to clamp down on the number of illegal persons working in the food business, a policy close to the heart of its previous boss, now moved to a hipper address in SW1. Legislation in recent years has put the onus for avoiding illegal practices heavily on employers. If convicted, firms face (and have had to pay) fines of up to £20,000 per employee, and key managers face jail sentences of up to five years. And the law has been gently fudged, with words that are increasingly seen in modern legislation – in this case that employers can be convicted if they have or should have had “reasonable cause to believe that the employee” is working illegally. “Reasonable cause”; an alarming test in practice, however “reasonable” it sounds. All this has become a nightmare of regulation and risk to employers with low paid and transient staff – agriculture, quarrying, logistics, and so on, as well as food services.
Which brings us back to the poetical burger joint. Here various versions of reality break in – all the same basic burger stories, but lots of different flavourings and fillings. The truth will no doubt emerge at some time, but the core seems to be that Byron was employing illegal persons to work in its restaurants. It had made proper enquiries, but had been provided with false documents by the illegal employees, or maybe on their behalf. How obvious these forgeries were, or how deep Byron’s processes, we do not know at this point (though Byron has not been threatened with prosecution.) The Home Office asked Byron to cooperate. Byron called its employees to meetings in various of its branches – allegedly to discuss Health and Safety practices (you may be amazed that anybody turned up but the Byron staff seem to be a diligent bunch). Immigration Officers then raided the meeting and arrested staff it believed were working illegally. Some thirty five people seem to have been seized and are in detention.
At which point all hell broke loose. Firstly, nobody has suggested Byron was attempting to circumvent the employment rules, or that it is any different in its employment practices to other food chains. It has been suggested that the Immigration Service sought Byron’s cooperation with some vigour and citing various sanctions that were open to it. We do not know if this were so. It may have asked nicely; or it may have caused Byron to reflect on what might happen if it did not cooperate. Certainly, there has been a chorus of protest that it is not very moral behaviour to trick your employees into attending a meeting knowing that they will be effectively arrested there. On the other hand, which of us would not condemn illegal practices and not assist the full majesty of the law in ending such practices?
Quite a lot of us, it seems. A boycott of various Byron branches was organised, with picket lines outside. In the High Holborn branch a large batch of cockroaches and other insects were released in the kitchens. (As an aside, do protestors keep such stock on hand for use? Or is there a central supplier – RentaRoach perhaps, a subsidiary of that old Private Eye favourite, RentaMob?) Various Byrons have been disrupted and forced to close temporarily.
But it soon seemed that there might more complex motives here. The name of Mr Osborne as a prime example of a Byron customer was frequently cited, as were the tendencies of Byron branches to be in “posh” locations. Like fox hunting, it seemed that it was the hunters that were more objected to than the hunting.
And the contras appeared; those who urged us to make a special effort to eat at Byron, to show support for a company that had been anxious to assist the law in its proper execution. Some of those supporters seemed not so keen on immigrant workers and welcomed a company with less immigrants on the staff – rather missing the point of the whole saga.
There were even those that wondered if in the highly competitive world of burger flipping, some wicked competitor might have been encouraging the cockroach-bearing protestors. Now a number of hard-working young people are locked up, whilst a good employer has to find new staff. Immigrants who have run all the dangers and difficulties of reaching the UK are unlikely to be deterred from chancing their arms in seeking work, to keep themselves from sitting pointlessly in detention centres. The Green Party has objected to Byron’s actions in assisting the Home Office. The Guardian has drawn attention to the group’s tax practices, which are certainly complex, but do seem to result in the payment of a reasonable rate of tax. The tale continues to build – but no doubt will be forgotten by the autumn.
What, you might wonder, would Lord Byron, poet, lover of liberty, fierce opponent of the heavy hand of the state, incessant traveller, make of the goings on in his burger chain? He probably would be amongst the cockroach releasers – but then, he would probably not be in Byron in the first place – he was a vegetarian.
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