Let’s return briefly to the Lindsey dispute now that tempers have cooled and a bit more information is in the public domain.
Over the course of the dispute the emphasis shifted somewhat from “British jobs for British workers” to portraying it as defence of working conditions.
Acas (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) is the state organisation which intervenes when the balance of forces in an industrial dispute make the outcome unclear and one or both parties wants a face saving settlement. It was invited to help reach an agreement into the recent dispute over subcontractors at the Lindsey oil refinery and it’s worth quoting one section of its report at length because it takes up the issue of whether or not the Italian workers employed by IREM were being paid at a different rate to British workers.
“IREM were fully aware and, in submitting a tender, would be implicitly accepting that all of their workers on site would be employed on the terms and conditions set down in the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI) including their pay.
This agreement, commonly known in the industry as the NAECI ‘blue book’, determines the pay and conditions for workers at all major engineering construction sites in the UK and requires that all member firms of the Engineering Construction Industry Association (and of other signatories to the agreement) abide by the terms of the agreement where projects are put within its scope. This is not mandatory but Total chose to conduct this project under the terms of the NAECI agreement.”
Apparently the only alteration conceded to the Italian workers was to trade their tea breaks for a longer lunch break. It isn’t obvious, even so long after the event that the strikers were aware of this. The thrust of much of the argument was that the Italians were working for less money and a lot was made of the fact that the only requirement on the employer was to pay the minimum wage. This turns out to have been irrelevant in this case.
It turns out that the dispute has established a precedent of unions demanding what Keith Gibson call jobs on a “one for one basis”. Keith mentions this in the video which can be found on the Socialist Party’s site. He adds that the employer was willing to give 100 jobs to local unemployed people to match the number of Italians employed. If that means anything it means that workers from outside a locality can be refused a job because of where they were born
The big positive to come out of this strike was that it gave a reminder of the power of unofficial action to make the anti-union laws a dead letter so when Keith says in the video that “it was a fantastic victory for working people” he is partly right. The big negative is that it has legitimised the idea of recruiting workers on the basis of nationality. That’s a very big negative which we will have cause to regret with every rise in the unemployment figures.
Liam redux 
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