Disgruntled with the long hours and low rates of pay, not to mention what they saw as the dreadful exploitation of children’s fantasies for profit, an attempt was made more than 50 years ago by unemployed actors, part-time bar staff and others donning the red suit to create a "Brotherhood of Father Christmas and Santa Claus trade union" in Britain.
A group led by American community activist Ed Berman took matters into their own hands. The protests began in early December 1969 when activists dressed as Father Christmas and his helpers started giving away toys outside Whiteley’s in Bayswater, London.
But when the 1969 protest made little impact, Santa and his helpers took their campaign to Selfridge’s in Oxford Street, where they marched up and down outside the store with placards. A spokesman told a journalist that their picketing was against non-union labour and ‘any store that would charge admission for a child to see Santa’.
Not everyone took their fairly inoffensive public stand in the true Christmas spirit. Not convinced that their picket line had been mounted in pursuance of a trades dispute, the police arrested twelve-costumed protestors, nine men and three women, and charged them with obstruction.
There is no record of the trauma suffered by any small children who witnessed two uniformed officers from the Met leading Father Christmas off to a police cell. But the Santas did not give in easily. As new year dawned on the 1970s they formed a trade union. The Brotherhood of Father Christmas and Santa Claus submitted its application to register as a union to the Registrar of Friendly Societies (which then performed the role now carried out by the office of the Certification Officer) and began a lengthy correspondence over its proposed structure and objectives. The paperwork is in The National Archives.
The application suffered a number of rebuffs (the Registrar’s staff objecting to the word ‘blah’ in the union’s proposed objectives as ‘meaningless’), and it is not clear whether or not the application was eventually accepted. However, the rule book barred any member from claiming to be the sole and genuine Father Christmas, and created a general secretary role with the title ‘Super Santa’.
Alas, this did little to convince the legal system that theirs had been a legitimate industrial dispute. In April 1970, the Selfridge’s Twelve appeared before Marlborough Street magistrates, Berman in his Santa outfit, and were each fined £10 plus £2 costs. From the bench, magistrate Edward Robey declared that ‘what had really occurred was a demonstration in fancy dress for the entertainment of children and passers-by’.
Sadly, nothing more appears to have been heard of the Brotherhood of Father Christmas and Santa Claus. But interest in pay rates for this much put-upon group of workers continued. Twenty years later, pay researchers at Industrial Relations Services continued to conduct regular surveys of their employers – which equally regularly reported that Santas were able to command higher rates than their helpers. But even these surveys ended as department stores ceased to employ their own Santas, with most outsourcing recruitment to the same small group of employment agencies.
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