Strikes have been breaking out at oil refineries throughout the UK this morning with more than 1,000 workers walking out in sympathy with a mass protest against the use of foreign workers.

Hundreds gathered on the third day of the original strike at Lindsay oil refinery in Immingham, North Lincolnshire, after owner Total negotiated a £200 million contract with an Italian firm.

Around 700 workers staged an unofficial strike at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland, and another 400 walked out of a refinery in Wilton, Teeside. The strike is also expected to spread to Wales, where police were called to Aberthaw power station near Barry after a demonstration broke out.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said the angry British workers were “entitled to an answer” as regarding the decision to contract work out to a foreign company.

Total said that there would be no “direct redundancies” because of the strikes. The firm added that the Italian and Portuguese staff working on the site would be paid the same amount as existing contractors.
However, it is thought that the European workers have been told to stay within their accommodation - barges moored in the Grimsby docks - to avoid confrontation with locals.

The British National Party decided to capitalise on the anger of energy workers, who are furious that British jobs have been lost to European competitors, by sending activists to hijack the unofficial strikes.

“Yesterday was a great day for British nationalism,” said a spokesman for the far-right BNP.

Meanwhile the trade union Unite, which did not sanction the strike, is trying to retain influence over its members. Bobby Birds, a regional officer for the union insisted that strikers at Grangemouth simply wanted to protect British jobs and were not out to confront the foreign workers.

“The argument is not against foreign workers, it’s against foreign companies discriminating against British labour,” he said.

“This is a fight for work. It is a fight for the right to work in our own country. It is not a racist argument at all.”

Unite, together with trade Union GMB, urged Gordon Brown to call an urgent meeting with industry heads in engineering and construction.

“We want fairness. We want the rights of our members to have the opportunity to be employed, not just on this job but on all jobs around the United Kingdom,” said Unite officer Bernard McAuley.

“There is sufficient unemployed skilled labour wanting the right to work on that site [in Grimsby] and they are demanding the right to work on that site,” he added.

The use of foreign labour - not migrant workers, but those employed directly by foreign companies - is becoming a critical issue for Unions, especially during this period of higher redundancies in Britain. Unions say that companies undercut British workers because foreign workers tend to be paid less. However, companies such as Total argue that in some cases, workers from abroad are more skilled for the job.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.