Once again, the Lindsey oil refinery has become the flashpoint for the struggle for the right to work…

Contracting fight flares up again

WORKERS, JULY 2009 ISSUE

As Workers goes to press, sacked workers from the Lindsey Oil Refinery are holding a demonstration outside the plant near Immingham and burning the letters they have received, telling them they must apply for their jobs by 5pm on Monday 22 June. Needless to say, few if any would do so. Around the country, workers were walking off the job in solidarity strikes.

The dispute, which began on 11 June, has its roots in the preceding days. On 5 June, the national Shop Stewards Forum (SSF – stewards from both Unite and the GMB), met to endorse the recommendation from the national committee to begin the process of organising for a national ballot of the membership in the engineering construction industry on our demands for a new National Agreement Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI - Blue Book).

The ECIA (the employer's body) had rejected every demand bar one two days previously, including a zero pay offer against a 5.5 per cent pay claim and significantly a register of all unemployed workers that the employer must exhaust before bringing in any worker from outside the country. (British Jobs for British Workers by any other name – an element of the claim that, oddly, the ultra-left seem to have no problem with, despite their fear and loathing for BJ4BW). A letter was duly despatched to the ECIA informing the employers of the intention to ballot.

On Monday 8 June, an employer – Blackett & Charlton – recruited 60 workers. The following day some 51 workers employed by Shaws had Post-It notes placed on their clocking-in cards informing them of imminent redundancy that Friday. The trades concerned were a close mirror to that of B&C.

This action was a clear provocation to the workers of Shaws, who had been at the centre of the dispute earlier in the year. The question is whether this a deliberate ploy by the employers to pre-empt the battle on the horizon over the new agreement, to induce the most militant section into walking off the job in defence of the 51 redundancies. Actions to date suggest this may be so, with their constant references to the strike as “illegal”.

Total has played cat and mouse first by sacking 647 workers, then with the stewards and full-time organisers by saying they will talk through the conciliation service ACAS, thus raising hopes of a settlement. On Friday, after keeping union negotiators waiting for four hours, Total repeated its statement about the strike being illegal and issued letters inviting the men to apply for their jobs.

There is also talk of Total’s desire to mothball the plant at Lindsey and blame its late delivery on British workers rather than the blunders by the Italian contractor IREM (all welds failed and set the job back five months – now that’s “specialist” workers for you!). Clearly a successful ballot would allow support, direction and control – guerilla action. What we have instead is sizing up for a toe-to-toe, and they've got bigger boots than us.

Provoking other sites into solidarity action allows the employers to repeat the “illegal” tag, and (if the employers and government dig in for long enough) to exhaust the enthusiasm for an “official”, and thus financed, struggle. Additionally, it shifts the focus from a struggle for the industry and its future, to one of “you’re losing money for the sake of them at Lindsey, again”. That is not to say that support for Lindsey is wrong but that it puts a greater strain on our forces – a move that only benefits the employers.

An area where every job counts

The area around Immingham in Yorkshire, scene of the most important industrial battle in Britain at present, is an interesting place. The “Pilgrim Fathers”, as they are known in the USA, sailed in 1608 from Immingham bound for Holland prior to their longer voyage across the Atlantic in 1620. They had come from the area just a little further inland around Gainsborough and Bawtry. Four hundred years later people in the area have decided to stay and fight for the right to live and work in their own country. The port of Immingham, though upriver from Grimsby, in modern times has a much deeper channel, up to 70ft. Immingham Dock was developed initially in the 1930s, and in the 1960s and 1970s the twin refineries were built at nearby Killingholme by Conoco and Total-Fina. Modern supertankers draw too much water to reach Killingholme’s jetties without a partial discharge at Tetney monobuoy at the Humber mouth. The oil is then pumped 17 miles to the refinery as the ship steams upriver to complete the pump-out at the jetty. If she were to discharge completely at Tetney, she’d be unmanageable in a wind. This is Britain’s largest port measured by tonnage. All the iron ore for the nearby Scunthorpe steelworks is landed there, together with massive tonnages of coal both for steelmaking and power. The conveyor belts, bunkers, etc for coal handling were originally installed for exporting Yorkshire coal. In an area hit hard by de-industrialisation and the current depression, every job counts. On the north bank of the Humber is Hull, connected to north Lincolnshire by the Humber Bridge, underused due to high toll charges. It is widely felt that this great, still underdeveloped estuary would thrive much better if the crossing were free. The debt remaining is quite tiny compared with Brown’s largesse to the banks.

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