The target of this campaign of strikes is now obvious

The target of this campaign of strikes is now obvious

Attempts to paint the week of walkouts as anti-foreigner look silly now that
Polish workers are joining the protests

Seumas Milne
The Guardian
Thursday 5 February 2009

It has suited government ministers, the CBI and the most backward parts of
the British media to present the multiple walkouts by engineering
construction workers at refineries and power stations across Britain during
the past week as a spasm of xenophobic protest against foreign workers and
migration. For Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and champions of free-market
globalisation, this is an indefensible rejection of free trade based on a
self-defeating misunderstanding of the facts. As Philippe Legrain wrote in
the Guardian yesterday, the strikers have "got it all wrong" by allegedly
blaming foreign workers for the mess we're in.

Meanwhile, the anti-union Mail, Express and Sun have expressed their honeyed
"understanding" for people they would normally castigate as wreckers and
layabouts. So ingrained has this view of the strikes become that BBC news on
Monday managed to edit a striker's comment in such a way that it appeared he
was refusing to work with Italian and Portuguese workers, when he was in
fact complaining that he had no chance to do so.

But in reality - as Derek Simpson - joint leader of the Unite union, said,
the campaign of strikes "is not about race or immigration, it's about
class". This is a battle for jobs in a deepening recession and a backlash
against the deregulated, race-to-the-bottom neoliberal model backed by New
Labour for a decade and now so clearly falling apart.

There certainly has been a danger that the dispute could be diverted into a
chauvinistic blind alley, not least because of the cue given by Brown's
cynical and fatuous use of the British National Party's slogan "British jobs
for British workers", which was then thrown back in his face by the
strikers.

But it hasn't happened. The strikers haven't scapegoated the non-union
Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Polish workers brought in by subcontractors
to replace local labour, let alone called for their sacking or repatriation.
They've targeted the employers and the government. The more nationalistic
slogans have largely been replaced - "workers of the world unite" even made
an appearance at Total's Lindsey oil refinery - and union activists have
made short work of BNP infiltrators.

Far from being any kind of echo of the small minority of east London dockers
who backed Enoch Powell in 1968, the real nature of this dispute was shown
by the hundreds of Polish workers who joined the sympathy stoppage at
Langage power station in Plymouth on Tuesday: not a campaign for privileges
for indigenous against foreign workers, but for the rights of access of all
workers in Britain to jobs, and against the use of foreign-based contract
labour to exclude or undercut them.

That was underlined yesterday by a joint statement in the name of
engineering, construction and chemical workers' unions across Europe
identifying the British strike campaign as part of a wider expression of
"anger by working people at the prevailing EU settlement which prioritises
the needs of business and capital over those of labour".

The signs were yesterday that the striking workers at the Lindsey refinery
had made a significant breakthrough after shop stewards agreed to recommend
a Total offer reportedly opening up half the construction work currently
contracted to the Sicilian firm Irem to British employees, without loss to
the Italian or Portuguese workers.

Total insists that union-negotiated pay rates weren't undercut by the Irem
contract (subcontracted through a US firm), though British workers suspect
they may have been through charges or tax arrangements. But the effect of
such contracting chains is to give the whip hand to employers to play one
national group off against another and, in this case, to deny jobs to local
workers at a time of sharply rising unemployment.

The dispute in any case goes far wider than one site. The focus is now
expected to shift to the new Staythorpe power station in Nottinghamshire,
where Alstom is using subcontracted Polish and Spanish labour, the refusal
to employ British-based workers has been more direct, and the undercutting
less open to question.

Underlying it has been the unpicking of the much-vaunted European social
model - and the 1996 posted workers' directive in particular, intended to
protect EU workers from exactly the kind of social dumping through
contracted labour which is at the heart of this dispute. As usual, the
government went for the weakest version, only requiring the minimum wage and
basic rights for groups of workers shipped in from elsewhere in the EU. Both
the directive and wider union rights have now been undermined by a series of
European court judgments which have tilted the balance further in favour of
corporate freedom and against workers' protection. And once again last
month, Britain opposed efforts to reverse the impact of the court decisions
and strengthen the directive.

No doubt New Labour ministers would regard such moves as protectionism,
locked as they are in a discredited free-market mindset. But the idea that
encouraging European corporations to send groups of workers back and forth
around the continent to live on barges hundreds of miles from home, while
others are thrown out of work, is a progressive step - or that it will
generate the productivity growth to propel Europe out of recession - is
evidently absurd.

Whether these unofficial strikes now fizzle out or not, they represent the
first time since the economic crisis went critical that any section of the
British public has moved beyond the role of passive spectators and taken
matters into its own hands. And although the walkouts are illegal under
anti-union legislation, such is the strength of the workforce and public
support that employers have so far stayed well away from the courts.

By promising talks with the industry about giving local labour its share,
Brown yesterday finally seemed to be recognising that inaction is no longer
an option. But talks won't go far enough. Britain likes to hide behind
European legislation, but other governments have shown local employment and
social clauses can be included in public contracts under EU rules - and the
authority to impose such conditions on new power station licences already
exists if ministers are prepared to use it. The strikers have driven the
corporate threat to jobs and working conditions to the top of the national
and European agenda. Unless the government moves fast, it risks inflaming
the very xenophobia it has been warning against.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/05/strikes-foreign-workers