Andrej Stopa, a finance student from the Czech Republic, was fired from his job at the branch of the fast-food chain Pret A Manger in York Way, by St Pancras Station, in the middle of September. He had been working there for two years. A statement on Pret’s website explains that he was ‘dismissed for misconduct’, having ‘made homophobic comments to a colleague’ in December 2011. Pret wanted to make this clear because ‘a number of misleading and untrue comments had been circulating on social media’ regarding the case. This is the difficulty for big corporations these days: information about their actions circulates so fast that they have to get their retaliation in first. In this case Pret wanted to damp down speculation that Stopa’s sacking might have had something to do, not with his insulting a colleague ten months earlier, but with the formal establishment of an independent Pret A Manger Staff Union (Pamsu) two weeks before. Stopa had taken a lead in setting up the union.

LRB 3 January 2013 | PDF Download