Yesterday the evening crew at the Shell Pernis oil refinery –the largest in Europe apparantly– started the process of shutting down production. (You can judge the scale of the operation by the fact that it will take a week to completely shut down the plants.) They will be joined by their co-workers at the Nederlandse Aardolie Maatschappij (Dutch Oil Company) from Wednesday. Both the unions and the Shell bosses have warned that the strike will lead to higher petrol prices if it continues for long.
The Shell workers are fighting Shell’s plans to reduce their pension rights. At the moment, Shell workers
retire at full pension at age sixty, with their pension premiums being paid entirely by Shell. Shell now
wants to move the retirement age to sixty-five and oblige its workers to start paying premiums themselves. This is already in place for new employees, but Shell now wants to extend it to all its workers.
Not unreasonable you might think, as this is the case with the majority of workers anyway. Why should Shell workers get a better deal than the rest of us? If we are expected to work till 65, why not them? Why should we suffer this strike?
As one worker set it on the NOS news last night, “Shell expects us to keep to the agreements we made, so we expect Shell to do the same.” If you want to, there is always a case to be made against striking, but if you never strike you cannot defend workers rights. If we meekly allow the bosses to redefine benefits with the argument that it is “no worse than what the rest of us get”, there will be a race to the bottom. There are always workers who have won more benefits than you have: the answer is not to push down their benefits to your level, but to push up your benefits to theirs.
And Shell is in no position to complain about the costs of all this, with record profit levels in the third
quarter of this year…