THE head of the catering company Gate Gourmet put himself on collision course with Britain’s third largest union last night, accusing it of creating a fictional account of the summer’s chaotic dispute in order to bring back secondary picketing.

In his first interview since the sacking of 667 strikers that brought Heathrow to a halt, Eric Born accused the T&G union of using “fiction and myth” to win support for the proposal at the Labour Party conference today. Mr Born, managing director of Gate Gourmet, said the workers were only sacked when his company decided to stand up to the illegal walk-out in August after “giving in” to six previous wildcat strikes.

He decided to speak out after Tony Woodley, general secretary of the T&G, urged the conference in Brighton to back a return to secondary action and easier strike balloting. Mr Woodley said that legalising secondary strikes would make employers think twice before sacking “weak and vulnerable” workers.

But Mr Born, 35, condemned the T&G’s portrayal of Gate Gourmet as an aggressive union-busting company. The row flared as the two sides are on the verge of agreement over the future of the sacked workers after weeks of talks.

Mr Born said: “It is disturbing for me to see how this dispute, which was an illegal action, is now being used to put forward a [conference] resolution that has nothing to do with what actually happened at Gate Gourmet. My view on secondary action is that the law is perfectly appropriate and any change would have a negative impact on the British economy.

“If we were such a bad employer, why would so many people want to come back? The T&G want everyone to come back. They call us a bad employer yet we pay above the market rate and have a final salary pension scheme. They can call us whatever they want for their political agenda but the facts are different.”

Mr Born challenged a series of T&G “myths” about the dispute. The T&G claim that Gate Gourmet plotted for a year to replace staff with agency workers on worse conditions.

Mr Born said: “This is utterly ridiculous. Why the hell would we spend a year trying to find a solution in negotiation with the union if this was our plan? And if it was a plot, why didn’t we do it on June 14 when they all walked out then on illegal wildcat action?”

The T&G claims that workers rejected a negotiated restructuring of the company in June because Gate Gourmet regraded 147 shopfloor workers and made them redundant.

Mr Born said: “We never regraded anybody. We made nobody redundant. It is very disturbing the way we are portrayed by the T&G like an American union-busting company. While our chief excutive is American, I do not have a single American member of management and I am Swiss.”

He concluded: “If this had been a legal dispute and they had gone through the balloting process, nobody would have been dismissed. So let’s be clear, the reason we are in the situation we are in is because — as I am sure the T&G likes to forget — this was the seventh illegal wildcat action that they took in three years.

“They put themselves in this situation but that is not something the T&G like to talk about, so I guess you have to have the story slightly different for their agenda.”

Mr Born said that his managers held 30 meetings with the union earlier this year to work out a restructuring programme involving 675 redundancies which was put to staff with union approval, only to be rejected in June.

As the company prepared to go to Acas, union shop stewards called workers to the canteen meeting on August 10 because of fears over the arrival of temporary seasonal workers.

The union claims that these workers were being lined up to replace existing staff on worse conditions. Mr Born said that the temporary workers came, as they did every year, to cover for staff absence during the holiday season.

Mr Woodley said: “This is a defining moment for our party in that we have an opportunity to choose whether we have the most restrictive employment laws in Europe that allow decent men and women to be sacked in a pre-planned action by a bad employer or whether the party that was built to protect the weak and the vulnerable at long last actually stands up and makes genuine much-needed changes to employment law to make sure that the Gate Gourmet situation could never happen again.”

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