Thread: UK and EU rules designed to keep labour cheap and weak

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The real theme of these strikes is not xenophobia but outrage at UK and EU rules designed to keep labour cheap and weak

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Seumas Milne guardian.co.uk, Friday 30 January 2009 17.29 GMT

Gordon Brown's promise of "British jobs for British workers" certainly counts, along with an "end to boom and bust", as his most cynical and asinine to date. Not only was he incapable of delivering on it under European Union law, but the slogan was bound to be exploited by the far right in the shape of the British National party – who coined it in the first place.

Now it's been thrown back in his face by striking energy workers across the country, protesting against local workers being undercut and excluded from a £200m construction project at Total's Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire in favour of Italian and Portugese workers brought in by the Italian company IREM. Sympathy walkouts have been staged across Britain, including at the Aberthaw power station in Wales and the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland, where last year workers won a famous victory against their private equity owner Ineos by closing down the North Sea Forties field for two days in protest at attempts to slash pension rights.

Of course, the BNP and its friends will try to exploit these rolling stoppages, as they have been doing at the Staythorpe power station in Newark, Nottinghamshire, where Alstom is refusing to hire locally and relying on non-union Polish and Spanish contracted workers instead. But it would be wrong – and play into the far right's hands – to portray this as a xenophobic protest directed against foreign workers and immigration, instead of what it actually is: a fight for jobs in the middle of a deepening recession and a backlash against the deregulated, race-to-the-bottom neoliberal model backed by Brown for more than a decade which produced it.

IREM claims it is paying the same rates as existing contractors on the Lindsey refinery site and is only using its own workforce because they are "specialised". Since the contract is secret, that can't be put to the test, but is regarded as absurd in the area, where engineering construction skills are high and plentiful. European workers are supposed to be shielded from such social dumping by the EU's posted workers directive, but Britain's version only offers limited protection. And the directive itself has been undermined by the European Court of Justice's recent Viking and Laval decisions – which effectively outlawed industrial action where unions are trying to win equal pay for migrant workers and banned public bodies from requiring foreign contractors to pay such workers local rates.

The reality is that EU directives and, even more so, British legislation have encouraged employers to exploit deregulated labour markets to play off one part of the workforce against another and drive down employment costs. Now that jobs are at a premium, organised workers in Britain are no longer prepared to put up with it and are ignoring anti-union laws to make their voice heard. So long as their protests continue to target employers and the government, rather than other workers, that will intensify the pressure on Brown to stop tinkering, come up with what is now long overdue: a serious programme of investment in public housing, infrastructure and transport to replace the jobs now haemorrhaging across Britain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ns-protest

We want fairness, we want jobs, say workers on the picket lines

Dispute over Italians shipped in for engineering project sparks strikes across the country

Robert Booth, Martin Wainwright and Steven Morris
The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2009

The flags outside the Lindsey oil refinery at North Killingholme in Lincolnshire seemed to say it all on a day British workers cried foul at European workers taking jobs here. The colours of the plant's owner, Total, hung on one side and the blue and gold stars of the EU on the other. Between them was the union flag, which had slipped towards half-mast.

It was an unusually poetic moment on a day when industrial action swept across the country in protest at European directives taking precedence over jobs for British workers.

Up to 3,000 workers from at least 11 oil refineries and power plants in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland mounted protests and unofficial strikes in opposition to the granting of an estimated 300 jobs to European contractors at North Killingholme. Union leaders said they should have been given to British workers.

The day of coordinated action seemed to take the government by surprise, particularly as Gordon Brown and the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, were at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. With a certain irony, as protesters gathered in the dark of the early morning in Lincolnshire, Brown was preparing to make a speech against the kind of protectionism they wanted to see more of.

About 800 workers led the nationwide action at the Lincolnshire refinery in scenes rarely seen in the UK since the 1980s. It was the third day of the dispute but it was the first time they had enjoyed such solidarity from colleagues around the country. Mechanical and building contractors in the oil and energy industry travel all over the UK to work and know each other well. Workers from Staythorpe power station construction site in Nottinghamshire travelled to Lindsey yesterday. They had staged their own protests this month after claims that workers were being hired from overseas.

Outside the Lindsey plant, Unite union regional officer Bernard McAuley climbed on the back of a flat-bed truck to rally hundreds of striking workers in fluorescent safety coats.

He said: "There is sufficient unemployed skilled labour wanting the right to work on that site and they are demanding the right to work on that site. Our general secretary of Unite and the GMB have called upon the prime minister to call an urgent meeting with the heads of industry in the engineering and construction industry to clients and the trade unions to get round the table. We want fairness. We want the rights of our members to have the opportunity to be employed, not just on this job but on all jobs around the United Kingdom."

The refinery was working largely as usual, with steam pouring from vents on the complex of pipes, chimneys and girders which towers over the flatlands of the Humber estuary's south shore.

Many strikers held placards and banners expressing their anger at the award of the contract to build a desulphurisation unit to the foreign contractors. One read: "Right to Work UK Workers." For many it was the apparent betrayal by Brown that rankled. In several speeches in 2006 and 2007 he had promised that his government would create "British jobs for British workers". One banner even quoted him: "In the wise words of Gordon Brown, UK jobs for British workers."

In the sprawling complex behind the protest, 100 Italian and Portuguese mechanical contractors had already started work. They are expected to be joined by hundreds more next month.

The foreign workers are staying in barges which brought them from the continent and are moored at Grimsby docks as a cost-cutting floating workers' hostel.

In TC's bar in Grimsby fish docks, where some of the British workers at the Total project regularly meet before work, there was support for the industrial action. Yet while factions from the right are anxious to capitalise on workers' vulnerability to stoke nationalism, the mood is one of anger tempered by respect for the Italians who have started work.

"They're hard workers these Italians and when this contract was organised British workers didn't want the jobs," said one of two brothers who run a fish processing business in the docks.

His brother, until recently captain of a small trawler, said: "There's only one answer to this and it isn't walking out on strike. Everyone sympathises with their reasons for doing it, but what they need is the ballot box."

The industrial action spread quickly across the UK. At the Wilton chemical site, Teesside, 400 walked out, and, in the biggest show of solidarity, 700 stopped work at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland.

About 500 stopped work at Scottish Power's Longannet power station and 100 at the same firm's Cockenzie power station. The unofficial actions also spread to Northern Ireland, where 60 workers protested at Kilroot power station in County Antrim, and in Wales, where 50 came out at RWE npower's Aberthaw power station.

Insulation engineer Andy Summers, 60, said: "I'm here today to show support for the British working classes. My parents and grandparents fought on the frontline in two world wars. It was the working classes who opened up Europe but it's now the working classes who are going on the dole - with jobs going to people coming from abroad."

Engineer Delwyn Smith, 36, of Caerphilly, said: "I've been here two years but was hoping to get work at the new Uskmouth power station being built soon. But we've heard they're planning on having 85% foreign workers and only 15% from the local area. I've got a 14-year-old son to think about and how I'm going to support his future."

In Davos, Brown told a press conference: "I understand people's worries about their jobs. I understand people's anxieties about employment across the country. But we are doing everything we can both to get economic growth moving in our country and to help people who are unemployed, to help them into new jobs."

That was not enough for Conservative leader David Cameron. "There are legitimate questions to be asked of this company," he told reporters in Davos. "If it is disqualifying British workers from applying for jobs, then that is illegal. But the prime minister should never have used that slogan. On the one hand he lectures everyone about globalisation and on the other he borrows this slogan from the BNP. He has been taking people for fools and has been found out."

The weekend will bring ministers some respite from the strikes and time for the negotiators at Acas to begin their work. But more action is planned for Monday.

Brown's British vision
"As we set out on the next stage of our journey this is our vision: Britain leading the global economy - by our skills and creativity, by our enterprise and flexibility, by our investment in transport and infrastructure - a world leader in science; a world leader in financial and business services; a world leader in energy and the environment from nuclear to renewables; a world leader in the creative industries; and, yes, modern manufacturing too; drawing on the talents of all to create British jobs for British workers."

Gordon Brown's first speech as prime minister to the Labour party conference, 24 September 2007

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... l-refinery