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It was 4am on the 1st of July as Jack Parker bolted upright in the basement below the Scarlett Letters bookshop. From above, Parker could hear drilling. Then a “thunderstorm” of footsteps. Startled and bleary-eyed, they hurriedly dressed, then crept up the stairs into the main bookshop. What they saw “horrified” them.
Dozens of people hurriedly packing books into boxes and unscrewing bookshelves. Amongst the torrent of people, maybe the strangest thing they noticed was the face of Blaise Agüera y Arcas: author, AI researcher and the vice president of Google’s research arm. Peculiar though it was to see one of the most senior staff at one of the world’s biggest tech giants busting into a bookshop occupation in Bethnal Green, maybe what was more peculiar was how it all came about in the first place. The setting for this bizarre scene was the Scarlett Letters, named for its owner Marin Scarlett, a radical east London bookshop that was greeted with widespread fanfare by many of the capital's left-wing activists.
And here Scarlett was, with a team of people, bursting into the bookshop in the middle of the night in an attempt to disrupt an occupation by a radical cohort of the shop’s staff. To Parker's mind, for a project started with the aim of platforming sex workers and being a “hub for resistance, community, stories and imagination” to have reached such a point was mortifying. How had things gotten so bad? Well, at least in Parker's telling, it started with a clogged toilet.
Sporting a black T-shirt, cropped hair and anticapitalist and LGBT-rights tattoos on each arm, the former bookseller meets me in the bare, debris-littered unit that used to house the bookshop. We’re here to talk about the whole sorry saga of Scarlett Letters — the rise, the fall, the union disputes, the rows, the occupations and the drilled locks under nightfall. But first, we need to talk toilets.
The leftover debris in the bookshop now. Image by Andrew Kersley
On a fateful day in early April, less than six months after the shop opened, a plumber had to be called in to fix the disabled toilet, which was inexplicably installed in the non-wheelchair-accessible basement of the bookshop. After the plumber was done, staff opened the work WhatsApp chat to see a message from Marin Scarlett updating the shop’s toilet policy: “We have had an issue over the last few weeks of people just letting themselves downstairs to use the toilet. Our toilet is there for people to use on request, but it is a problem if someone feels they can just let themselves down there without asking.”
Keen to thwart any further opportunistic toilet-users, Scarlett had a new policy. Staff were to personally escort anyone who asked to use the toilet to ensure they didn’t steal any stock or snoop around the staff area. She then told her staff she wanted to “role play” some scenarios in which they could practice saying “no”. Seemingly, the crux of the toilet problem was that they were simply too kind, too feminine, too British: “You are all extremely nice, assigned female at birth, in customer service, mostly British etc., and all of this sometimes doesn't lend itself to ‘no,’” the WhatsApp message explained. She suggested staff had been failing to tell customers “no” when they asked to borrow scissors or mugs from the shop, to come behind the counter or when they wanted to serenade them without prompting.
Like a toilet with a burst pipe, “toilet-gate” then erupted. Almost immediately, a dispute broke out in the work WhatsApp over the message; there was anger not just about that final message, which Parker saw as “bizarre and sexist”, but over the political ramifications of making members of the community ask to use the toilet in the bookshop.
While there had been rumblings of unease from staff for months at the store over the lack of shifts, sick pay and secure contracts, something changed in that moment. “We hadn't broadly discussed unionising with everyone,” explains Parker. “But I saw this, it was like we were in complete solidarity. We needed to unionise immediately.”
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