LEADERS of the Unite and GMB trade unions are recommending a new jobs offer to a mass meeting at the Lindsey Oil Refinery, Lincolnshire, today. The workers rejected an offer of 60 jobs yesterday morning.
Construction workers at the site have been on unofficial strike for more than a week demanding jobs and more than 1,000 have rallied outside the plant.
The Italian company IREM has been brought in as a sub-contractor by the main contractor Jacobs to extend the Total refinery. IREM has recruited a 200-strong Italian and Portuguese workforce to carry out work on the site, effectively excluding local workers.
This provoked an unofficial strike by about 300 construction workers at the oil refinery on January 28. There have been spontaneous walk-outs at more than 20 major construction sites across the country over the past week.
This determined strike action by construction workers has forced IREM/Total to offer about 100 new jobs at the Lindsey Oil Refinery, where originally there were none, while preserving the jobs of the Italian and Portuguese workers brought in by the contractor.
The unofficial strike wave by this key group of workers, who build and maintain vital energy installations, like power stations and oil refineries, also put Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour government on the spot.
It has exposed the fact that the government is spearheading the drive by the financiers and multinational corporations, organised in the European Union (EU), to turn the whole continent into a cheap-labour paradise for the employers.
Brown and company support Article 49 of the EU Treaty and the Posted Workers Directive, which allows employers to bring in a workforce on rates agreed in their home country, disregarding union agreements in the country where they are working.
Bosses only have to pay the legal minimum wage and observe health and safety laws and this has received the backing of the European Court of Justice in the Viking-Laval judgement.
As union officials have emphasised, this is both an issue for the British working class and for workers throughout Europe.
Unite official Keith Gibson said on Tuesday: ‘I call on every trade unionist around this country in the construction industry to come out on official action. . . This issue is based around the defence of the construction industry national agreement. . .’
Shop steward Kenny Ward, raised a crucial issue yesterday when he demanded that IREM make public the contract of employment with its workforce, with details of rates of pay and conditions.
He called to ‘throw out’ judgements ‘that give the employers. . . the ability to exploit Italians, exploit Portuguese, exploit the British worker in this country and maximise profits. . . This is a European-wide practice of exploitation, of victimisation and discrimination. It needs stamping out.’
Whatever workers decide at Lindsey, it is clear that national strike action on major construction sites is necessary to defend national agreements and force all contractors to comply with them.
Like the unofficial strikes, such a national strike will be political, involving a fight against Brown and the EU.
If the Brown government continues to champion the energy giants and EU dictates it must be removed. It has to be replaced by a workers’ government that will nationalise the huge energy companies, control energy prices and provide jobs on union rates of pay.
Across Europe workers face a cheap-labour drive imposed by the financiers’ and monopolists’ EU.
In Greece workers, youth and small farmers have mounted strikes, occupations and mass demonstrations against the government imposing EU policies.
More than 2.5 million French workers went on strike last week against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s imposition of EU-dictated privatisation and sackings. Unions are demanding EU employment directives be wiped out of the German constitution.
British, French, German and Greek workers are united in struggle against governments imposing EU dictates. These governments have to be brought down, to be replaced with workers’ governments. The EU must be scrapped to make way for a Socialist United States of Europe.
