BRITAIN’S LABOUR Government was embarrassed by a series of “wildcat strikes” yesterday over the use of “foreign” – EU – labour at the Lindsey Oil Refinery at North Killingholme in Lincolnshire. Ministers last night called on arbitration service Acas to establish the facts about working practices at affected sites amid warnings the unofficial action could spread on Monday.
Up to 1,000 demonstrators staged a protest for a third day at the new £200 million plant in Lincolnshire while sympathy strikes were staged at power stations, oil refineries and other sites across the UK, including at the Kilroot power station in Northern Ireland. In Scotland an estimated 1,500 contractors joined the unofficial action at seven sites, amid union claims some employers are choosing to “debar” UK workers.
That was denied by Total, the company in the eye of the storm following the award of a contract to extend diesel refining capacity to a California-based company which in turn sub-contracted to an Italian firm, IREM, after a tender process in which five UK and two European contractors responded. The Lincolnshire dispute exploded over IREM’s decision to use between 300 and 400 of its existing permanent Italian and Portuguese workforce, although Total insists the contract anticipates no redundancies from the existing contractor workforce and that it continues to employ up to 1,000 local workers.
The anxiety for the government is the potentially inflammatory impact of “foreign” workers carrying out such work as Britain’s unemployment toll rises, amid TUC warnings that peoples’ anxieties about their job security could boil over into “difficult disputes”. The embarrassment for Labour was that many protesters carried placards reminding Prime Minister Gordon Brown of his 2007 Labour conference promise of “British jobs for British workers”.
Mr Brown was criticised at the time for comments widely considered incompatible with EU law, although Downing Street suggested the prime minister did not regret that promise and was working hard to help British people fill job vacancies.
Speaking in Switzerland where he is attending the World Economic Forum, Mr Brown said he understood peoples’ anxieties about jobs as the recession bites – while also warning banks against “a new form of protectionism”.
Employment minister Pat McFadden called in Acas after Derek Simpson, joint leader of Unite, said: “It’s not the question of foreign workers. It is the question of whether these companies . . . are saying they will debar UK workers . . .”