Construction contractors at Total’s Lindsey oil refinery have settled their labour dispute by agreeing to reinstate 700 sacked workers, amid concerns that the sackings had led to wildcat sympathy strikes across the country.
The deal – brokered at a meeting between the managing contractor, Jacobs, the Engineering and Construction Industry Association (ECIA) and the GMB and Unite trade unions in the early hours of yesterday – will be put to staff working on Lindsey’s hydro-desulphurisation unit building site on Monday. The proposal is expected to be accepted.
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However, the redundancy programme is not over at Lindsey. The dispute started because 51 workers were laid off by one of Jacobs’ subcontractors on the site, at the same time as another was hiring. But the project is nearly finished, so staff will still have to be cut. Once all workers, including the original 51 redundancies, are back at work on Monday a new formal redundancy programme will start.
The reinstatement deal includes an assurance of a minimum of four weeks employment, and guarantees both efforts to co-ordinate new work and normal severance payments in the event of redundancy.
There were disruptions at nine engineering building sites in response to the problems at Lindsey, including the South Hook liquefied natural gas terminal and the Sellafield nuclear plant.
The Lindsey deal is a stark volte-face from the employers’ earlier hardball tactics of immediate dismissal. Sources close to the dispute credit the change in attitude to demands from Total that the completion of its building project take priority over subcontractors’ industrial relations issues. Pressure from other companies affected by the problems was also a factor.
That’s twice now that socalled wildcat strike action forced Total and its contractors into a retreat at Lindsey. Sympathy strikes elsewhere helped put pressure on the bosses, who might have been able to ignore the strike at Lindsey on its own. It also showed that the Thatcherite laws forbidding such wildcat action need to be repealed and until they are, to be ignored by the workers, if not by the unions.