Training | 2009.06.24
National ballot planned as strike goes on
• Building workers aim to end repeated disputes
• Lindsey action causing delays to £200m project
Thousands of building workers will hold a national ballot this month to try to settle repeated disputes that are causing multi-million pound delays in the power station and refinery industries.
The move was announced todayas hundreds of strikers and their supporters protested outside the Lindsey oil refinery on the Humber estuary, where work on a £200m expansion has stalled for 10 days.
Thousands more contract builders have walked out in sympathy at sites from Scotland to south Wales, including 900 men at the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria. Feelings are running so high that 200 wildcat strikers at Longannet power station, in Fife, Scotland, rejected a call from their union, the GMB, to go back to work after a breakthrough in the deadlock over talks at Lindsey.
Total, the French owners of the refinery, reversed their policy of no negotiations while the unofficial strike continues, and called on their subcontractors and the GMB and Unite unions to get round the table. The about-turn followed an overnight meeting in London between construction employers and Unite\'s general secretary, Les Bayliss, who has pressed repeatedly for talks to begin.
Union negotiators and contract managers at Lindsey met today in London, to tackle a list of grievances and allegations about hiring and firing at the refinery.
The strike concerns a contractor\'s redundancy notices to 51 steel erectors, platers and welders, allegedly given without notifying them that another subcontractor was taking on 61 new staff.
The 647 strikers, who were sacked last week after walking out in support of the 51 men, say the redundancies also breach an agreement saying that no British workers would lose jobs while Italian and Portuguese "package deal" staff, shipped in on a barge to Grimsby docks, were still on site, which they are.
Sympathy action yesterday spread to plants previously uninvolved, including several more in Scotland and Coryton oil refinery in Essex.
Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB, told cheering protesters at Lindsey that the union was launching a £100,000 hardship fund to help tide them over their time without pay.
He told a mass meeting in the refinery car park: "We think we are about a week away from launching the ballot. There are lots of technicalities, but we are absolutely clear we are going down that road. Meanwhile, there will be no resolution of this dispute unless all the sacked workers are reinstated."
Total placed responsibility for sorting out the mess at Lindsey on its contractors, a complex chain including German and Italian firms. The company, which had turned down negotiations for four days, said: "Total is actively encouraging talks to be opened between its contractors and the unions about how to facilitate the return to work of its contracting companies\' former workforces."
The company warned that disputes had set the plant\'s new £200m hydrodesulphurisation unit back by six months and threatened to raise its costs by more than a quarter. Further trouble could risk the entire project, it said.
Total added that contractors believed they would have enough workers back at work by the end of the week to restart work on the hydro-desulphurisation plant. The company has run the site at Immingham, north-east Lincolnshire, for 40 years.
A striking electrician at Lindsey, who fronted today\'sprotest dressed as the grim reaper, and did not want to give his name, said: "This is about saving the British construction industry. We\'ve had long apprenticeships and training and we do things properly. Total has run into trouble because contractors have taken on people who don\'t have the same approach. They\'ve tried to rip up the rule book which management and workers have used successfully for 30 years."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/[...]plans-national-ballot-refinery
