'Jobs for British' protesters threaten strike against power supplies

[Turborama]

Source: Telegraph (UK)

Britain is facing the threat of a co-ordinated nationwide strike which could hit energy supplies later this week as the dispute over the employment of foreign workers escalates.

By Robert Winnett and Simon Johnson | Last Updated: 12:25AM GMT 02 Feb 2009

Union leaders warned that Gordon Brown had risked "inflaming" the situation by "condemning" workers with legitimate complaints.

British workers have alleged that they have been barred from applying to work on major construction projects across the country.

They claim that some firms are using loopholes in European laws to only hire cheaper foreign workers.

Workers at power plants, oil refineries and nuclear sites will meet this morning to discuss what action to take.

Sources disclosed that a co-ordinated national strike for later in the week is likely to be called.
It follows a series of illegal wildcat strikes across the country last week.

Some trade union members are pushing for more radical steps to be taken such as blockades of oil refineries and petrol stations. Similar action caused a major crisis in 2000.

There are fears that right-wing extremists are also seeking to join the action with the British National Party (BNP) calling on its members to assist the strikers.

Ministers are also braced for protests to turn violent after rioting broke out during industrial action in several European cities. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, yesterday said that maintaining the British tradition of "peaceful protest" was "really important".

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/4424912/Protesters-threaten-co-ordinated-national-strike-as-industrial-action-escalates.html

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Protesters at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire

-- ---- --

Terrible timing for the Brits, considering this news...

Britain hit by worst snow in 20 years

The most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years has brought widespread disruption across Britain today with up to 10 inches falling even in the South East.

Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4424991/Britain-hit-by-worst-snow-in-20-years.html

[Waiting For Everyman]

1. This is a really a screwed up situation - almost like our "Buy American" thing only worse.

The refinery in Britain is owned by Total, a French company. It subcontracted an expansion project to Jacobs Engineering Group in Pasadena, California. Jacobs subcontracted to IREM, an Italian company, stipulating that only IREM's own employees (Italian and Portugese) would be used. No British workers are even allowed to APPLY for these jobs in their local area.

So basically, this American company, Jacobs, is the middleman which is pocketing the profit saved by using this cheap labor to undercut the British jobs. (I think Jacobs deserves some protest from us for this. It would be nice if our unions could pick up on it too.)

http://www.jacobs.com/content.aspx?id=482

And the strange thing is, most of the news reports are not mentioning Jacobs, but only the other companies involved. I wonder why? :sarcasm: Here's one that does though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EabWX3_mdA

Now it gets better. You won't believe this. Jacobs is the new incarnation of Sverdrup & Parcel, which made the faulty parts that caused the I-35W Mississippi Bridge to collapse in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2007. They merged after the disaster. (I guess that company name wasn't very profitable anymore.)

bridge collapse
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nerQhIyOwxM

commentary just afterward
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x-ckRu5jEY&NR=1

Sverdrup found at fault for it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TchK7852-Ik


Update on more strikes to be soon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9EPo7xG9-o

British National Party link, coordinating the strikes:
http://bnp.org.uk/2009/02/british-wildcat-protests-the-resources-youve-asked-for/

[Turborama]

2. Thanks for sharing all that background info.

Very interesting and some if it is quite surprising, am bookmarking the vids to watch later...

[Waiting For Everyman]

6. I happened to see an article on the same story yesterday too.

I got interested in checking further because the British are struggling for the same thing we are with the "Buy American" provision in the Stimulus. Their slogan is "British Jobs for British Workers". Their job situation with the EU is very depressing - worse than ours, as this situation above shows.

There's a British National Party over there, taking up this issue, which looks to me like it might very well gather a lot of support from this protest, which is planned to expand today. The people commenting on the party's forum expressed hope in a way that reminded me of the Obama campaign. It's almost as if they're surprised to have hope about their prospects, and are grabbing onto it as we did. In fact I wondered if any of them were thinking about our election, and that change is possible. That's the implicit impression I got from it.

Anyway, I think this incident just may turn out to be more important than it seems now.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. As LeftishBrit points out in reply #5 below, the BNP are extremist xenophobes

so their 'surprise at having hope' comes from the fact that most people despise the racist party - but they can sometimes find a way of saying "see? We told you this was the fault of foreigners - they should leave our country". See, for instance, this short video (an excerpt from the BBC's leading current affairs programme), about their links with David Duke: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=04QolIvfQEw

There's no real comparison between Obama's 'hope' and the 'hope' of the BNP. Obama wouldn't even be allowed to be a member of the BNP - anyone who has non-northern European ancestry is banned. The BNP has condemned mixed race marriages.

[Waiting For Everyman]

9. Thanks, MV - I hadn't seen LB's post below until later

and of course I hadn't heard of this party before. These were just my impressions as a total outsider. However I would say to you that I can completely understand how these workers feel, being shut out and marginalized in their own country. Trade is fine and all, but that's taking it way too far. And I think one of the mainstream parties had better start finding some solutions for them, or no doubt the BNP will grow out of necessity. Just 2 cents.

Btw, I didn't see one word in the comments I happened to read about anyone of color, or of course that would've been a big tip off. In fact, none were directed personally at the non-Brit workers at all, which is rather remarkable, it was all about the strike action they hoped for. They didn't seem to be party regulars to me, but I could be wrong. Just impressions.

[Turborama]

15. "Young, Nazi And Proud" - Inside the BNP

Hiya, just stumbled across this documentary and thought you might find it an interesting insight into the BNP...

http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=34519

[Hannah Bell]

12. thanks for that.

[NashVegas]

3. UPDATE: More strikes loom in row over hiring foreign workers at low wages

Up to 1,000 construction workers at Sellafield, the nuclear reprocessing facility, will decide today whether to join the walkout over building jobs, which unions claim are being handed straight to overseas workers.

Ministers were forced into an embarrassing U-turn yesterday after Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, suggested that the Government was preparing to bow to union demands to push for measures in Europe to protect British jobs. Unions want a new EU directive to overturn a ruling by the European Court of Justice in 2007 that made it easier for companies to circumvent pay deals by hiring foreigners on lower wages. They believe that Gordon Brown could be forced to take action after promising “British jobs for British workers” in his 2007 Labour conference speech.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article5636276.ece

[NashVegas]

4. UPDATE: Strikes over foreign workers spread to Sellafield as Mandelson ups stakes

Lord Mandelson today raised the stakes in the row over foreign workers by declaring that "no laws were broken" by the company which brought over Italian and Portuguese employees.

As a new wave of wildcat strikes hit Britain, the Business Secretary appeared to pre-empt the findings of Acas, the conciliation service, which has been asked by government to determine if any laws were broken at the Total refinery in Lincolnshire.

The Government's stance appears to have inflamed workers at energy and construction sites around Britain. Amongst the walkouts this morning include:

- Hundreds of contract workers at Sellafield nuclear site, which the management said they expected to last a day.
- Around 700 contractors at the Grangemouth oil refinery in central Scotland, who took unofficial action on Friday, walked out again today. They also decided they would return to work tomorrow.

- Two hundred workers at Fiddlers Ferry power station in Widnes, Cheshire, also walked out in support this morning

- The Longannet power station in Scotland was also hit.

- Contract workers at the Heysham nuclear power station in Lancashire and a site at Staythorpe near Newark in Nottinghamshire also joined the strikes

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5640794.ece

[LeftishBrit]

5. This is a serious problem...

due to a combination of Thatcherite laws crushing the unions, and big holes in EU employment law, allowing this sort of undercutting.

Unfortunately, and predictably, the generally anti-EU xenophobic extremists (BNP especially) are latching on to this. Nonetheless, the grievances are very real and justified here, and the EU law has to be reformed yesterday. AND the UK government needs to reverse the anti-union, anti-industry culture that Thatcher created and New Labour continued,

[Turborama]

8. How do you see this playing out? n/t

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. Both times I was in London, I was surprised to see almost all the hotel jobs

held by Eastern Europeans, except the front desk jobs. The housekeeping and breakfast staff all had Eastern European accents. The coffee shops and restaurants were largely staffed by Eastern Europeans. I don't think I encountered a single coffee shop worker who was actually English, and I drink a lot of coffee.

I can see, then, why British workers might be upset, but I wish someone other than the BNP were on the issue.

Still, it's an illustration of the dangers of having "free trade" with a country that's a lot poorer than one's own.

[Hannah Bell]

13. if they're the only one on the issue, that's very interesting. the major parties

conceding the obvious populist issue to the fascists = empowering them.

[fedsron2us]

10. There is a great post on this subject in todays Guardian

written in response to an article by Max Hasting attacking the strikers. It basically covers the ground and shows how the press has misinterpreted a dispute about tax and access to job opportunities into a race/migration issue.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/02/hastings-max-recession

SearchMeGuv

02 Feb 09, 10:33am (23 minutes ago)

Cut the crap about "protectionism", Max.

This dispute is about the widely recognised trend for British employers to avoid employing British-based workers - or paying British taxes and NI - by importing foreign-based workers on poorer conditions, conditions that are only sustainable because the foreign-based workers often do not have to pay British taxes or housing costs, and the company itself can offset all of the costs associated with importing them.

And it's not just the proles in industry who are suffering from this - I've seen the same phenomenon on large IT projects, for example. Companies insist they cannot find suitable "skilled" workers, so they have to import cheap foreign workers. But often - as in this dispute - they never bother trying to find British-based workers or even trying to negotiate changes to pay/conditions in the first place.

As for the alleged evils of "protectionism", these companies pay little or no tax in the UK, they pay low wages in the UK, and their foreign workers pay very little tax here, if any, and send their money home. Indeed, on some government IT projects it is the taxpayer who is actually subsidising this process of de-skilling the UK workforce and cutting UK earnings and tax revenues. In what way is this "flexibility" good for the UK economy?

If foreign-based workers worked here under the same conditions as British-based workers, then I'm sure most of us would agree that British workers should expect to compete on the basis of their skills, and it would not be unreasonable to expect some flexibility over conditions either.

But how can people compete for jobs that are never advertised, or engage in a Dutch auction to sell their skills more cheaply than somebody from a low-wage country who's living on a f***ing company barge, when British-based staff still have to pay their British bills?

30 years of kowtowing to big business over employment rights has turned Britain into a nation of share-croppers, scrabbling for scraps from the rich man's table (remember Corus, trashing British jobs at successful steel plants simply because it was easier to fire Brits than Dutch workers?), while our oh-so-f***ing-globalised City-dominated economy spirals down into oblivion. After all, the IMF obviously isn't too impressed with Britain's economic potential, despite all that "flexibility". But the media and political classes still don't get it, because their jobs are not at risk in any case.

Still, as the British recession turns to depression, I guess eventually we'll be able to compete with Poland, Portugal and perhaps even Bangladesh for low-wage jobs. 30 years of market fundamentalism and that's the best we can offer our people? You're doing the BNP's job for them.


The key point is that the issue here is not really wage arbitrage by the company (ie just hiring cheap labour) since these are skilled workers from within the EU and are presumably earning more than the UK minimum wage. Instead it is an abuse of tax privileges available to foreign workers in the UK under its domicile laws and the 24 month rule on expenses. These basically permits overseas workers employed in the UK to escape income tax if the earnings are paid to them in their home country. In addition it allows the employer to pay living expenses and accommodation without deduction of tax and NIC (something not normally available to UK employees who would be considered to be at their 'normal place of work') for upto two years. The regulations were originally designed to encourage international corporations to set up shop in London by offering their executives lots of tax incentives. Of course, the system is now widely being abused by these same companies to avoid paying tax and National insurance Contributions to the UK Exchequer by bringing in workers from outside the UK.

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/pdfs/ir20.pdf

The British government could stop this practise overnight by simply reframing the legislation so that the overseas workers were treated as UK resident employees after say 6-12 months as happens in many other European countries. This would break no EU or international laws and would probably kill the practise stone dead.

[IndianaGreen]

14. More on OP's story: Strikers defy arctic storm

Strikers defy arctic storm

(Monday 02 February 2009)
by JAMES TWEEDIE

UNOFFICIAL strikes against EU-sanctioned "social dumping" spread across Britain on Monday, hitting three power stations amid freezing snowstorms.

Workers braved arctic blizzards to maintain picket lines at the Lindsey oil refinery at Killingholme in North Lincolnshire, while the unfortunate bobbies sent to police them resembled snowmen by midday.

Contract workers at the Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, Heysham nuclear power station in Lancashire and Staythorpe power station near Newark in Nottinghamshire were among those taking unofficial action for the first time.

Around 700 contractors at the Grangemouth oil refinery in central Scotland, who took unofficial action on Friday, walked out again yesterday, although they voted to return to work today.

The dispute centres on the refusal of an Italian subcontracting firm at Lindsey to offer jobs to local workers.

More than 1,000 workers gathered for a mass meeting at Killingholme on Monday and voted unanimously to allow the union to start talks with management.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/britain/strikers_defy_arctic_storm

[eridani]

16. Good idea. British jobs for Brits, Amearican joba for Americans

Indian jobs for Indians. Employ your own first, and only then look elsewhere. Stop this race to the bottom shit, now!