Lindsey oil refinery: workers of the world unite?
Posted on Friday 30 January, 2009
Filed Under Trade Unions
REHASHING a 1970s National Front slogan represents a particularly crass attempt at triangulation, even by New Labour standards. But that is precisely what Gordon Brown was doing when he dropped the ‘British jobs for British workers’ soundbite into his 2007 conference speech.
Unsurprisingly, the words are now being quoted back to the prime minister in the wake of the unofficial walkout at Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire, which has triggered a wave of wildcat stoppages up and down the country.
I’m trying hard to remember if any other issue has provoked a similar response in this country at any point over the last quarter of century; if it has, I’d be at a loss to tell you what it was.
For Marxists, full support for what Marx called ‘the self-activity of the working class’ is central to our political thinking. When workers move into struggle against their employers, we are clear on which side we stand. So naturally we are in full solidarity with everyone taking part in today’s action.
The trouble is, the far left is not the only strand of political opinion that is backing the Lindsey dispute, which centres on the decision of an Italian subcontractor to use foreign workers on a construction project at the site.
As the Times reports:
The British National Party was trying to hijack the unofficial strikes today sending activists to join the picket line as the Unite union, which did not sanction the strikes, attempted to retain its influence over members who are angry that British jobs have been lost to European competitors.
“Yesterday was a great day for British nationalism,” said a spokesman for the far-right BNP. As workers addressed a crowd of around 600 outside Lindsey one of the workers shouted: “Get the BNP rep up there” but he was quickly shouted down.
As Socialist Party blogger Phil BC points out in a fine post here, overt racism is thankfully not the dominant mood right now. But a certain nationalist undercurrent is unmistakeably there, present in the logic of the strikers’ chief slogan..Brown’s cheap flirtation with a racist catchphrase the year before last may have far greater consequences than anyone could have predicted at the time.
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40 Responses to “Lindsey oil refinery: workers of the world unite?”
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Do you support the EU? Because the refinery is just complying with EU regulations. You can’t take them to task for giving the deal to the Italians because that kind of thing is a consequence of the EU.
Shouldn’t you rather be railing against the greed of the UK brothers, who managed to prove themseleves less cost-efficient than the Italians. The Italians!
And what is the crap about the BNP being “far-right”? They are full-on socialists. They’re just “national” socialists, rather than “international” socialists like you. Stop trying to pin their crappy economic policies and mindless thuggery on the right.
There will be a similar backlash over the welfare reforms: when some of the poorest people in the Uk face benefit sanctions, read cuts, then they will turn around and look for scapegopats. Many of the left are saying we should carefully intervene, of course they should, but surely one can only intervene if you have been involved, this hasn’t been the case for many years as far as basic everyday issues are concerned.
It’s wrong isn’t it?
There’s not a blind thing “the left” can say about it though having kept entirely silent on the planned erosion of manufacturing competitiveness in favour the overvalued currency that was a byproduct of extra Tarquin jobs in the City.
Ah well…
When that tit Kinnock was trying to rid the Labour Party of Trots lke Derek Hatton, did anyone actually explain to him that if you make Labour an electable proposition to the middle class you then, by default, simultaneously hand the working class over to the BNP?
In the end, for the reformist Left, there has to be a price paid for New Labour and the completely erroneous acceptance of the terms of enagagement offered by the bourgeoisie (i.e. parliamentary democracy). Appearing to stand alongside the BNP is the price to be paid by these reformist Lefties if they want to re-engage with the working class. On this occasion, once again, violence is the issue – if there is no distance between the BNP and ourselves on the issue at hand, then we need to create that distance through violent confrontation.
Reading this rather confused and lost post made me very sad, Dave. I guess those of us who aren’t so squeamish about class violence need to start reeducating lapsed proletarians.
I find it objectionable that there is a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction that these workers will unthinkingly follow the BNP. Have they shown any inclination so far? It’s a real issue, and IT’S GOING TO GET WORSE. There is wholesale job slaughter going on, only this week my brother was made redundant from his job on thhe Metro newspaper, and as he said to me, ‘Print journalism is dead, I’m going to have to get out of it.’. A lot of people are going to be feeling like that. Things are going to get ugly, you mark my words. To be honest, I think this may spell the end for the Labour Party. What does everyone else thing?
credit where it’s due.
The usually hilariously prole-averse SWP seem to have dimly recollected that socialism has, at root, a class basis and is not, in fact, a networking mechanism for chinless students.
It might be opportunism, in fact it is, obviously…but nonetheless.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2009/01/wild-cat-strikes-are-not-racist.html
Scratch
In the finest tradition of Stalin and the 1930′s: SWP guru and writer Richard Seymour of the reasonably influential Lenin’s Tomb Blog has done a u turn and what he posted earlier are now ‘none words’ black is now white, etc. Now he has the party line what was first identified not as a racist strike and one to be ultimately supported is now indeed now one, and that things are more complicated. If one didn’t know the SWP, you would think the revision was a spoof.
How on earth can anyone take these people seriously?
“Full support for the self-activity of the working class” is conditional upon it not being racist: what would you have said about the dockers who struck in support of Enoch Powell in 1968, Dave?
I don’t actually think the prsent strikes are simply reactionary likes those. Jack Haslam gets it right at “Shiraz Socialist”:
“I think we need to distinguish between the slogans used by the strikers and the underlying issues.
The idea of ‘British jobs for British workers’ is a reactonary dead end. However the issue driving this sudden explosion of militancy is the use by the employers in the engineering construction industry of gangs of contractors sealed off and isolated from the main body of workers. The way one leading socialist militant in UNITE put this was that it shouldn’t be presented as an issue of british versus foreign labour, but of the rights of organised Labour.
Set ups like the contractors in this case have more in common with an organisation like William Collison’s pre ww1 free labour association than they have with a ‘normal ‘capitalist concern that recognises trade unionsor in which workers can organise for recognition. You have a group of workers sealed off from the rest of the workforce and billoted in digs away from contact with workers in the local town.
This kind of thing flows from the Viking lavalle decison see IER briefing here: And it was inevitable that a protest of this type would emerge sooner or later, given the way that contractor gangs have been used to attack jobs, pay and conditons across a number of industries in recent years.
http://www.ier.org.uk/node/275
The way forward is for the labour movement to launch a serious fight for jobs across the economy as a whole. with occupations and work sharing on full pay etc.
We need to point out that nationalism is a dead end, capitalism is international etc. However, we should not oppose the strikes as such, but see them as a spontaneous outburst that has taken the form it has and with the nationalist ideology it has because of the failings of the trade union leaders to prosecute a serious fight on a clear class basis.
I don’t think this is a straightforwardly reactionary strike that should be opposed by socialists, rather we would want to see a more focussed and class based internationalist strategy. If you want to put forward a specific demand it would be for direct labour.”
The last thing we need is more protectionism.
My take on the causes of the crisis and recession here
In EC law an employer has to put work out to tender all over Europe (and the world, the company involved her is actually American). That’s called the ‘free market’. I’m not in favour of it. How are workers’ rights going to be enforced for gangs of workers from far-flung corners of the world?
I worked as a supervisor for a massive company, we did large scale contracts all over the world, I know we would take our engineers and of course main contracting staff but that would be about twenty people, we would always employ locals because you do not have to pay the extra cost of living allowance and hotel fee’s . so you have to ask your self why has this company brought in people from other countries and the answer is simple really cheap Labour. I mean what happens next the min wage is canceled so we can compete, or will we be excluded from building contracts. or will we need to vote in staying in the EU.
I believed it was right to enter the EU but not at this price.
Jim Denham
“Full support for the self-activity of the working class” is conditional upon it not being racist: what would you have said about the dockers who struck in support of Enoch Powell in 1968, Dave?
John Palmer over on Lenins tomb deals with how the IS reacted to the dockers support of Powell.His proposals for how socialists should respond to this dispute are spot on.
Lenin: Your summersaults on this are very confusing. When Londondockers struck in support of Enoch Powell in ’68, IS (forerunner to the SWP) argued strongly with the small but influential group of IS dockers to join the strike but argue against support for Powell. Surely trade unionists should be joining this struggle with their own slogans such as “Open the Books – publicise the exact terms of the subcontracts!” – “For a joint meeting of British and Italian/Portuguese workers to defend all jobs” “For a joint programme in defence of jobs and conditions across the European Union.”
Wholesale abstention on the grounds that the strike movement in at risk of being highjacked by the BNP will bring about exactly that.
Jim Denham,
your slip is showing. There is no such thing as “the Viking lavalle decison”. Fer God’s sake man, try educating yourself by reading the IER link you provided before lecturing the rest of us on something you clearly know nothing about. You are referring to two separate European Court of Justice decisions, one known as the “Viking case”, the other as “the Laval case”. In addition you may wish to read up on the Ruffert and Luxemburg ECJ judgements.
Try taking a deep breath and reading this piece before you explode.
As strikers rage at the use of foreign workers at an oil refinery, BRIAN DENNY lays the blame at the door of the EU.
Undermining labour
(Friday 30 January 2009)
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/undermining_labour
BRIAN DENNY
THE use of Italian contract workers at Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire is the latest example of employers across Europe going on the offensive and undermining organised labour.
Refinery owner French oil giant Total gave the £200 million contract to Italian company IREM as it was the cheapest tender.
More than 300 of its employees are today being kept on barges berthed at the docks in nearby Grimsby and are being ferried to the refinery to work.
The company claims that the Italian workers are on the same wages as their British counterparts, but, even if this was true, sleeping on containers in the freezing seas on the Humber estuary constitutes a lower social wage for these workers.
The fact that British energy workers do not know the conditions that these contractors are employed on is enough in itself to set alarm bells ringing.
This process undermines the very idea of collective bargaining, a concept which is under attack in a number of ways by employers and the European Union.
Total is exploiting EU law which demands the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour, a neoliberal model which facilitates a race to the bottom in wages and conditions.
This process began back in 1987 with Margaret Thatcher’s Single European Act, which Tory MP John Bercow later boasted was about imposing a single market to achieve the “Thatcherisation of Europe.”
This internal market was designed to slowly remove barriers to the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour, the so-called “four freedoms,” until capital could move anywhere and any time regardless of the consequences.
Rather than liberate workers, it has enslaved them by turning people into commodities, with very few collective rights, to be exploited and dumped without regard to social models built up over generations in the member states.
We saw this process at work in the Irish Ferries dispute in 2006, when Irish seafarers were displaced by sweated Latvian and Polish labour being paid a third of the wages.
The Gate Gourmet strike of 2005 also saw low-paid Polish workers displace local staff, mainly British Asian women.
Four recent judgements by the European Court of Justice, known as Laval, Viking, Ruffert and Luxembourg, have also enshrined this race to the bottom in ECJ case law and gives huge new powers to employers to bring in contract labour anywhere within the EU.
The ECJ and the European Commission are effectively implementing a programme to narrow the scope for member states to preside over their different social models and labour markets in the context of foreign companies posting workers to their territory.
In the Luxembourg case, the ECJ does not even recognise Luxembourg’s right to decide which national public policy provisions should apply to both national and foreign service providers on an equal footing.
This process is also being played out at Staythorpe power station near Newark, where employers in the energy sector are also refusing to employ local unionised labour.
French engineering group Alstom has been contracted by energy privateer RWE to build the power station and two companies, Montpressa and FMM, have since been subcontracted to carry out construction work.
It is clear that the the employers’ response to the growing economic crisis is to exploit neoliberal EU rules on “free movement” and drive down wages, exclude organised labour and maintain their profits.
A stark illustration of this is the fact that the spontaneous strike action came a day after Shell reported the biggest annual profit in British corporate history of £21.9 billion, leading to renewed calls for a windfall tax on energy companies.
But the use of cheap foreign workers as a battering ram against organised labour is not a new concept.
In 1934, as European countries followed the United States into the Great Depression, French writer Antoine de St Exupéry described Polish miners expelled from French coalfields once they had fulfilled their usefulness as “half-human shadows, shunted from one end of Europe to the other by economic forces.”
This is the European reality for more and more workers as Brussels imposes its increasingly discredited neoliberal economic model that treats labour like a tin of beans.
Even Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has said that angry energy workers were “entitled to an answer.”
Yet while new Labour remains wedded to the creation of a pseudo-state called Europe, where democracy and workers’ right only exist in the past tense, then more and more workers will be asking the same questions.
Jim Denham,
your slip is showing. There is no such thing as “the Viking lavalle decison”. Fer God’s sake man, try educating yourself by reading the IER link you provided before lecturing the rest of us on something you clearly know nothing about. You are referring to two separate European Court of Justice decisions, one known as the “Viking case”, the other as “the Laval case”. In addition you may wish to read up on the ECJ judgements http://www.ier.org.uk/system/files/Fed+News+article+Ruffert+and+Luxembourg.pdf.
Try taking a deep breath and reading this piece before you explode.
As strikers rage at the use of foreign workers at an oil refinery, BRIAN DENNY lays the blame at the door of the EU.
Undermining labour
(Friday 30 January 2009)
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/undermining_labour
Hey, let’s kick the really stupid/ugly workers..they are SO lumpen, no wonder they are never asked back to Davos for drinks and globalisation on a stick with those who really count..WHAT will Polly Toynbee and Timmy Gorton Ash think? Comment is Free? Muddy boots on Gordon’s floor?
Agree with a lot of that posted…anyone loking for “purity” in this strike is stuck in comic book politics. Workers in red T shirts on one side..capitalists with top hats on the other…
What realy needs to be confronted head on is the fictitious notion of “freedom”…freedom of labour, freedom of movement, in the interests of…freedom of global CAPITAL…we have gone from the divine right of kings to the divine right of capital. NEVER to be politically challenged except (a la the Lords) to mumble “What’s my lobby fee?…£100K is way too low!”
Notice how all these (disperate) issues are coming together? And across Europe?
Climate change /Heathrow…Gaza/muslim population…lump labour disconect?
And Gordon finally admits today (Davos)…”I’m clueless!”
AND to “blame the EU” correctly is to blame the EU for what it IS…neo liberalism with a constitution. Not the rosy toynbee myth.
British jobs for British workers is indeed a dead-end, reactionary slogan and its use should be discouraged, but if the Left doesn’t engage with the issues thrown up by this – race-to-the-bottom working conditions, anti-trade union laws and the sheer feelings of impotent desperation felt by skint working-class people – then it faces a future of irrelevance.
Sure, there may indeed be a few bigots and xenophobes on the picket lines but there were a few bigots on the Gaza marches too but we were right to march with them. Political activism is a messy business and you can’t always choose your battles cleanly.
tony the tiger: re “Viking lavalle decision” and my “slip”:
1/ I was quoting someone else (Jack Haslam);
2/ I’m sure that Jack is fully aware that they are two seperate decisions about the same issue – he was writing hurriedly and taking it for granted that his readers have some intelligence. In your case, he was clearly mistaken.
Now, can we return to the politics of this most serious situation?
PS: I broadly agree with Palmer and the 1970′s IS; Lenny Seymour’s contortions over at the Tomb are worth following as an excercise in getting just about everything wrong, and then trying to cover your tracks.
Jim Denham: “Now, can we return to the politics of this most serious situation?”
The politics of this situation are that the so-called ‘free movement’ of labour, which you support using the provisions of the Single European Act and other EU Directives and case law is nothing whatever to do with the freedom of human beings. On the contrary it is leading to social dumping on a massive scale as firms try to make the working class pay for the recession created by deregulated, globalised capitalism. The workers at Lindsey and the 20 other sites that have walked out to support them have realised this. The political question is will the trade unions in Britain, emasculated as they are by 25 years of Tory and Labour anti-union laws and fettered by a leadership that still tries to breathe life into the still born illusion of ‘social Europe’ have what is necessary to mount a political and industrial challenge to call for repeal of obnoxious EU legislation and get out of the EU. I rather doubt it without a change of leadership. What’s Kevin Coyne’s line on this by the way?
Jim Denham: “PS: I broadly agree with Palmer and the 1970′s IS; Lenny Seymour’s contortions over at the Tomb are worth following as an excercise in getting just about everything wrong, and then trying to cover your tracks.”
Pot. Kettle. Black. [see above]
“tony”: forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I now suspect that you’re one of those antiEU nutters who pollute the left under the guise of ‘campaigns’ like “Trade unionists against the Single Market/Euro”, etc. If you’re not, I apologise in advance.
How the hell does opposing the EU stop the inexorable drive of capitalism towards unifed markets? Only an explicitly anti-capitalist campaign can do that, Anti-EU campaigning *does* however, increase nationalism and racism. One hopeful sign is that the strikers have not taken up Britain’s EU membership as an issue (despite the Morning Star’s attempts to persuade them to do so) and so internationalism is still on the cards.
In fact, the potential racism in these strikes is largely the result of anti-EU sentiment. Thank gawd that it hasn’t (yet) become a prominant slogan in the strikes.
Ah, the sweet balm of Denham’s reasoned polemic! You just can’t help yourself, can you Jim? You’re like both of Newman and Baddiel’s history professors rolled into one:
“RN: I saw your Mum coming out of the V.D clinic.
“DB: I’d like to say that anyone with A.I.D.S, that’s you, that is. That’s your girlfriend and your Mum and your Dad. You know, like a pair of pants with some cack in it? That’s you, that is.”
I think you’ve answered your own question. The EU is a single market area within which we see daily the damaging social effects of the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour. If you are opposing the EU’s social dumping agenda you are opposing capitalism’s drive for unified markets, which far from being inexorable is dependent like most political developments on the balance of class forces.
Completely correctly the strikers at Lindsey are making demands on their own national government, which they feel owes them some modicum of accountability, rather than on the unelected corporate fodder of the EU Commission, which believes it owes nothing to anyone who doesn’t have PLC after their name. However, when we see these oil terminal protests in the context of riots by disillusioned workers in Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and France over their governments’ it is clear that the protests must assume some EU dimension. After all, the Italian and Portuguese workers employed by IREM in Lindsey are here courtesy of the EU Posted Workers’ Directive.
What we need is a progressive European-wide response by trade unions to this crisis of social dumping, involving coordinated defence of national collective bargaining rights, coordinated strike action to overthrow obnoxious ECJ rulings banning strike action and an end to EU-driven liberalisation, which is preparing public services for wholesale privatisation. Unfortunately, neither the ETUC, nor the TUC leaderships will lead such a campaign mired as they are in a post-Delors vision of a fictitious European social model that is at least 20 years out of date. For all your bluster about your anti-racist credentials Jim you support a system in which foreign workers live on barges in the Humber fucking estuary in January. That is inhuman!
Jim Denham “One hopeful sign is that the strikers have not taken up Britain’s EU membership as an issue (despite the Morning Star’s attempts to persuade them to do so) and so internationalism is still on the cards.”
What would be the difference if they had striked because the refinery had hired a Yorkshire company when there were Lincolnshire workers who, in their estimation, could have done the job? Or even hired a man who lived, say, 3 miles from the refinery when there was another man who lived only 2 miles away simply because the man who lived 2 miles away demanded a higher wage? Or how about a British firm based in the Falklands? Where we draw the line gets quite difficult if we don’t use the price mechanism as a tool to guide us to the best use of resources, isn’t it?
‘And what is the crap about the BNP being “far-right”? They are full-on socialists. They’re just “national” socialists, rather than “international” socialists like you. Stop trying to pin their crappy economic policies and mindless thuggery on the right’
Prove it then, numbnuts.
Ah, “tony”: you are one of those nutters. Explain, please *how* getting out of the EU will benefit UK workers in any way whatsoever. When you’ve miserably failed to do that, take some time out to read The Communist Manifesto, paying especial attention to the section on “Reactionary Socialism.”
PS: workrs will defeat reactionary Euopean legislation and rulings in exactly the same way they defeat national legislation and rulings: by campaigning against them, and defying them… in or out of the EU makes absolutely no difference.
People can start by doing the minium something and signing the Unite sponsered petition against social dumping at:
http://www.amicustheunion.org/lavalvikingruffert/
The problems in this case stem from much more than the precise details of the case. There was a period of greatly rising expectations. Now there is a massive economic crisis and dreams are being shattered.
Unrest in Europe takes many forms, as I have been Blogging for a while now. This is part of that wave of massive popular anger.
Surely’s it’s up to the left to get invovled and try to make it a progessive revolt. For, for example, a European Social Republic that finishes social dumping?
Jim Denham: “workrs will defeat reactionary Euopean legislation and rulings in exactly the same way they defeat national legislation and rulings: by campaigning against them, and defying them… in or out of the EU makes absolutely no difference.”
Well this is just incoherent nonsense. So-called ‘free movement’ of labour is enshrined in EU legislation and is the fundamental reason given by everyone from UK government ministers to academics to lawyers to trade unionists for the rampant social dumping being undertaken by euro firms: Irish Ferries (2005), Viking (2006), Vaxholm/Laval (2006), Rueffert (2007), Luxemburg (2008), Lindsey (2009),… This is a problem occurring right across the EU, created by EU legislation. The way to deal with it is to restore labour rights through national collective bargaining agreements and employment reform starting with John McDonnell’s ‘Trade Union Rights and Freedom Bill’. The fact is that even this very modest proposal would place the UK in breach of ECJ judgements will force the labour movement to confront it’s guilty demon. EU membership is not compatible with workers’ rights or human rights.
Andrew Coates: I suggest to you that a more effective and practical way for the left to get involved in the fight against social dumping and to make this a progressive revolt would be to get behind the Irish ‘Vote No to Lisbon’ campaign – as Unite, RMT and the Technical, Engineering Electrical Union in Ireland are already doing. A second ‘No’ to the EU’s super-state, liberalising agenda this autumn in Ireland would do more to oppose social dumping than day-dreaming of a European Social Republic.
“EU membership is not compatible with workers’ rights or human rights…to make this a progressive revolt would be to get behind the Irish ‘Vote No to Lisbon’ campaign”
That’s it, but it’s not going to be very immediate, is it?
As for ‘the left’ getting involved: I’d just like to see some of the enthusiasts for open borders turn up and argue that to the strikers. What are they telling the strikers – this is ok as long as the foreign workers are paid the rate for the job? That’s what most, including Galloway, are saying in their papers and blogs (and radio shows). Are any of them really showing up at the pickets and arguing this? Have any of them been lynched yet?
jock mctrousers: “That’s it, but it’s not going to be very immediate, is it?”
Agreed. The labour movement needs to develop appropriate demands to deal with the immediate reality of social dumping – No replacement of permanent jobs by ‘fixed term’, sub-contracted labour – All workers to be employed on collectively bargained contracts – All job vacancies to be advertised through job centres without exception. How’s that to start with?
In addition the labour movement must develop a political response that identifies the EU for what it is – a neo-liberal, super-state in the making – and calls on our government to either reform it or get out. Failure to do so will deliver the fascists their biggest breakthrough for a generation.
Galloway,Frank Field and the BNP are putting it about that the Italian Workers are paid less than the British.
On the basis of what evidence?
Are they just making it up to rabble rouse?
This is putting all foreign workers in this country under threat and British workers abroad in an invidious position.
…identifies the EU for what it is – a neo-liberal, super-state in the making
How unlike our own dear nation…if you exclude the “super” bit.
You can’t build socialism in a piddling little island…we can’t build fuck all here given the lack of exchange controls and whatnot – an entire continent on the other hand…
That’s the whole point of EU social dumping, 68DW – setting worker against worker in a race to the bottom. See Professor Keith Ewing on BBC2 Newsnight Friday night here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hcgyg
The ‘free movement’ of labour is one of the founding principles of the EU. Since the Viking and Laval ECJ judgements in December 2007 the rights of European firms to ‘freedom of establishment’ under Article 43 of the EC Treaty (the freedom of businesses to relocate their activities to another EU Member State) and Article 49 (‘freedom to provide services’) trump Article 28 on the right of workers to take collective action, including the right to strike.
Are the workers being paid the same as existing workers?
Total say that all 400 IREM staff have the same pay and working conditions agreed as the existing contractor workforce. The EU Posting of Workers Directive (1996) allows an EU firm to employ its own staff on a temporary project in another EU state on a contract of limited duration as long as the employer abides by local employment regulations, which as we know in the UK are not exactly rigorous. The bottom line is we do not know what they are being paid because the contract is commercially confidential. The absence of transparency and accountability allows opportunists like Galloway and the BNP to claim what they like.
I’d say that the question of whether or not the ‘Posted Workers’ are being paid the same hourly rate is not the main point. They may be, however housing your labour force on a barge in Grimsby fish dock in January, not being required to train local workers in the necessary engineering skills for the jobs available in the area and having no wider responsibility for collective bargaining with the workforce or the community constitutes a major cost saving for the contractor. The key concept to grasp here is the social wage, rather than just the hourly rate of pay. I have worked in many places where the sub-contracted workers earn a higher hourly rate than the directly-employed workers, however they don’t get to join the occupational pension scheme, they don’t get the collectively bargained annual leave, sick pay and other arrangements. They can be sacked at a moment’s notice. So, it’s still a saving for the employer.
Scratch: “How unlike our own dear nation… if you exclude the “super” bit.
Do try to keep up. What we are seeing with the emergence of the EU super-state is a qualitatively worse situation for workers even than that Thatcher and Blair managed to create in the UK. Recent ECJ judgements are more damaging to trade unions than the worst of the UK Tory anti-trade union legislation. The Lisbon Treaty embeds privatisation of public services within the single European market as a constitutional requirement, with the objective of making it illegal for any future democratically-elected national government to renationalise them. Get with the program, man!
This is a battle about the right to organise and the right to live as citizens, as well as “free labour” connotations we have from Mandy a simple view of Labour as a commodity in its most brutal form. It should be warehouse or stored on barges, not allowed to integrate into the surrounding community, not have a life off the job etc. This is free market Europe. I would suggest a Campaign for a SOCIAL Europe, I have considered a “Workers’ Europe” but that would come later. We need to be able to grab the initiative now if we make any inroads we can explain that a Democratic Europe of free citizens must be run by and for the majority of its citizens, the workers. We must make this a European campaign. We should look to straight forward demands. Call on Brown to withdraw the whip from Frank Field. Support for a rewritten Lisbon Treaty taking workers’ rights into account in the coming Irish referendum and a future UK referendum.
Anti-EU bollocks a la ‘tony the tiger’ is a complete distraction from the task at hand and can only play into the hands of the nationalists (and worse). Happily, the tankies, UKIP, BNP and other little-Englanders have so far failed to steer the movement in that direction.
Father Jack Denham: “…I would suggest a Campaign for a SOCIAL Europe, I have considered a “Workers’ Europe” but that would come later … need to be able to grab the initiative now … explain that a Democratic Europe of free citizens must be run by and for the majority of its citizens, the workers … a European campaign … straight forward demands … Brown to withdraw the whip from Frank Field. Support for a rewritten Lisbon Treaty taking workers’ rights into account in the coming Irish referendum and a future UK referendum….”
It’s ecumenical, Father.
Does that mean you agree with my proposals, tony?
I have every sympathy with the workers. Labour or New Labour have earnt this crisis for years of being poodle like to the EU as well as USA. They are gutless and “not fit for purpose”. Protectionism is perfecty justified as a short term measure in the present climate, it is already happening elsewhere. If there is a choice between an Englishman loosing his job and his home or an Italian / Portugese or anyone else – well no contest. This situation is akin to the BNP getting votes, purely because the main parties do not have the balls or will to face up to the difficult things, they always have one eye on the ratings, the other on their egos and the country goes tits up.
I would say this is jumping to conclusions a little – the BNP may be out there recruiting, but this particular protest does not seem (yet) to be against all immigrant labour generally, just this one company with an unfair recruitment process.
But it wouldn’t be surprising if it did spread into something broader. The tabloid press have been screaming in working people’s faces for the past five years that all the problems in their lives are being caused by scrounging/job-stealing foreigners, and the middle classes are hellbent on giving these scumbags preferential treatment purely out of spite toward the working class.
So it’s hardly surprising that unrest during a recession is starting to gather around demands for restrictions on foreigners and immigrants. The right’s propagandising has been very successful.
It’s a tough dilemma for the socialist left though; solidarity vs ideology, almost. As another commenter said, it’s really the price to be paid for the Labour Party abandoning the working class – it shouldn’t be surprising that people start looking in directions other than socialism when the main socialist party once in government immediately decided it preferred wining and dining the global elite.
WELL DONE LADS ITS ABOUT TIME SOMEONE TOLD THESE
PEOPLE WHERE TO GO. IT WAS LONG OVER DUE.
GOOD LUCK AND KEEP FIGHTING FOR FAIRNESS IN ALL
AREA’S
To all you fools who say british workers are greedy i say this. If minimum wage is so fair then why people who have exist on it, have to have this wage topped up by tax credits. And if everyone in the private sector gets forced down to this great wage then who will pay all the public sector wages. Also why wont police and teachers and otheirs who earn far more, work for this wage if its so fair. This is really about companies and goverment forceing working men to work for next to nothing and using overseas labour as a tool against them. We live in a circle and when we allow british workers to become poorer it will effect the whole circle. If wew use our brain we will all stop buying fuel from total, so lets all support british men who want to work and spead the word. Dont buy total fuel.
AM I MISSING SOMETHING , AS I UNDERSTAND IT YHE IDEA OF THE e.u. was to keep all work and business inthe eu countries,
well why then did TOTAL award a contract to theUSA who in turn passed it on to an italian company. so the real culprits are total and the usa company. now everyone can see what mess the yanks have got us into with IRAQ and AFGANISTAN
I AM NOT A MEMBER OF ANY PARTY . BUT I STILL THINK BRITISH PEOPLE FOR BRITISH JOBS COMES FIRST
This is from the AWL website:
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Below is the press release on the dispute from CGIL, Italy’s biggest union federation. Notably, it says about the Italian sub-contracting firm involved in the dispute, IREM:
“We want to make the point that this is a non-unionised firm. Which says a lot about its approach to industrial relations”.
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Press release from CGIL, Italy’s biggest union federation
Rome, 2 February – “What’s going on in Lincolnshire is one of the ugliest pages in the history of the trade union movement in these globalised times: English workers against Italian workers.” That’s the view of the heads of the European office of FIOM-CGIL (CGIL engineering section), Sabrina Petrucci, and of CGIL’s European secretary, Nicola Nicolosi, commenting on the strikes by English workers against the contract given to the Sicilian firm Irem to build a plant in a north England refinery.
“The current economic crisis,” say the two officials, “caused by a capitalist system devoted to financial speculation, lacking rules, and centred on debt, is producing one of the worst social evils: the poor against the poor, workers against workers.” Furthermore, while the economic crisis has led to the loss of thousands of jobs, for Nicolosi and Petrucci, “the solutions put forward at Davos are exactly the same as those which created the crisis. Even in Europe, unemployment is growing and fear is becoming a social phenomenon. There are cases of racial intolerance in Italy too: odious, unacceptable, to be condemned and fought with maximum energy.”
But the two union leaders also say that we should understand the ill-feeling underlying the events at Lindsey Oil. “We have a duty,” they say “to understand the workers’ unhappiness. The consequences of European judgements on the labour market, on the right to free movement of goods and people, are multiplying, opening the door to social dumping.” In this regard they cite the recent Viking Line and Laval judgements from the European Court “on the pre-eminence of employers’ rights over those of trade unions sanctioned by national contracts and laws, which have aroused justified concern from trade unions, lawyers and workers. In these cases ‘salary dumping’ becomes an opportunity for the firms to cut labour costs and creates unfair competition.”
In the case of the Lindsry refinery, in Lincolnshire, Nicolosi and Petrucci add, “the protest is taking on connotations that the nationalist right-wing is turning against the ‘foreigner’. The English workers claim that this contracted work should use the local labour force, already hit by the loss of 500 jobs in December alone. If it’s true that the contract includes a clause excluding local labour, we say that’s wrong and a source of discrimination. The firm, on these questions, has enormous responsibilities. What’s more, we want to make the point that this is a non-unionised firm. Which says a lot about its approach to industrial relations.”
But, at the same time, “the effects of the crisis in globalisation must not slacken the ties of international solidarity between workers, condemning all those events which could lead to xenophobic and racist forms,” say the two union leaders and, furthermore, argue that “European law should not allow social- and wage-dumping, as has happened in the Viking and Laval cases, and the parts of the ‘Distacco’ directive that can be abused to differentiate between workers from different countries must be modified.”
And “that the CES campaign ‘equal work, equal pay’, against differentials in pay and conditions for the same work in the same country should be developed. To develop the spirit of a Social Europe we need solidarity, a value to which we can link aspirations and prospects for widespread well-being.” Nicolosi and Petrucci conclude, “the economic and financial crisis can’t be fought within national boundaries, even if these English workers are given a response within their national boundary: we need a European and global trade union initiative to support the unemployed and for new social and industrial policies and perspectives.”
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Terry Wilde says minimum wage is crap because it has to be topped up with tax creddits,(12.55 3rd Feb 09) Well he`s right. If joe bloggs down the street was doing jobs on the side, everyone would say he is screwing the system and should be prosicuted for doing so. Well when people are being payed minimum wage and having to depend on top ups from the system. Could it be that the employer is screwing the system by knowing that if they dont pay a real wage the system will top it up. So they are in fact srewing the system. Regarding the Linsey stopage, what I have to say to the Government is, You are always asking us for money to help out other Countries, in fact you give away billions of our hard earnt money to help out other Countries with out even consulting us.NOW YOU WANT TO GIVE AWAY OUR JOBS. I rest my case. N.Tate