Articles with the Tag Shell strike

Last week Shell workers went on strike to keep their retirement rights. It did not take long for Shell to cave in (link in Dutch) under the threat of closing down production at the refineries at Pernis, “Europe’s largest”.

The unions fought to keep the retirement age for current employees at 60 as well as to force the company to keep paying the entire pension premiums. In the new agreement with Shell, they have largely though not entirely gotten what they wanted. For current employees, retirement age will stay at 60, but the official retirement age will still become 65. To bridge the gap between 60 and 65, there’s the “levensloopregeling”, which is a new savingsplan introduced by the Dutch government this year, through which you can save up part of your wages before taxes to either take early retirement or unpaid leave, with wage taxes defered to the moment you actual start using the fund. Shell has now pledged to annually pay 6.5 % of each worker’s income into this fund, instead of the 3 % it had first offered. By trading in two vacation days, each employee can add another 1.5 % annually as well. However, the Shell workers will have to start contributing to their retirement funds: 2/5 of their wages.

So, a victory for the Shell strikers? Or could more have been achieved with a more hardline attitude?

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…