Workers and union officials in the engineering construction industry long suspected it, but now they have proof. Sub-contractors in the industry have been paying some "posted workers" (workers who are sent by their employer to work in a different country on a temporary basis) substantially less then nationally agreed rates for the job.
An audit demanded by Unite and GMB unions into the pay of workers building a massive new gas turbine power station at Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire showed that a sub-contractor (Somi) was underpaying its Italian workers by an average of 1,300 euros a month.
The news has fueled anger among workers in an industry where there have been several waves of wildcat strike action over the last 12 months. The Staythorpe workers have been near the forefront of these actions, and were on strike against the main contractor, Alstom, over another issue, as recently as 12 January. This current issue, like the strikes at Lindsey Oil Refinery (LOR) in Humberside in January 2009, are about the undermining of the industry's national agreement (NAECI). But the background to all of these disputes is resentment caused by high unemployment among construction workers.
There has of course been another issue in these disputes — the fact that the slogan/demand "British Jobs For British Workers" has often been taken up by engineering construction workers. And there has been demands for preferential recruitment for "local" workers.
Now the GMB have called a demonstration in London on 3 February to mark the anniversary of the first LOR strike. It has been promoted by the noxious, union-busting, right wing Daily Star as a "British Jobs For British Workers" demo. Any racist and nationalist attitudes and ideas, such as those promoted by the Daily Star, need to be challenged on this demo by those committed to the ideas of an internationalist, anti-racist workers movement. To do this though we first need to understand the industrial issues facing these workers.
Unions fought for and won the NAECI national agreement (also called the "blue book") with the employers of the Engineering Construction Industry Association (ECIA). The agreement sets out agreed wage rates, the union recognition and facilities rights, skill levels required and many other rules. Now the NAECI is being undermined.
At LOR last year the employers used the EU "Posted Workers Directive" to exempt several hundred Portuguese and Italian workers from the NAECI. Under this directive (as amended by the European court) when a worker is posted by their employer to another country, they can remain on the terms and conditions relating to the country they were originally recruited in. The Lindsey workers went on strike to demand all workers on site — whether posted or not — be covered by the NAECI. The scandal at Staythorpe once again shows the NAECI being attacked by contractors secretly paying the "posted workers" substantially less, in violation of previously-made guarantees by Alstom.
The workers are facing more general attacks.
Younger workers are finding it harder to get adequate training or opportunities to expand their skills . This impacts on safety, wages and jobs.
There has been a deliberate policy of de-skilling of the workforce.
There are also issues around segregation and attacks on the union's rights to organise. At Lindsey and elsewhere posted workers have been deliberately isolated from the rest of the workforce and from the shop stewards. The Lindsay workers made free access to all workers for the shop stewards one of the demands of their dispute. The unions certainly need to do more to organise posted and migrant workers. They need to use interpreters to help actively integrate workers into the union or at the very least give advice on workers' rights.
The unions are also being attacked by bosses using the age-old tactic of blacklisting trade union militants. We know that the employers in this industry have been keeping an active blacklist because they were caught at it. However despite a high profile public campaign by the unions to stop the practice it seems to be continuing.
At the best of times this kind of work is temporary and often seasonal. Workers move around from one job to another and as a result do not know whether or not they are going to have a job in the coming months. The recession has made this worse. Sites such as Staythorpe, Aberthaw, Isle of Grain, Lindsey are in deprived areas where these jobs are some of the best paid going. The general situation has caused anger and frustration to spill over. Unfortunately many of these workers have come to see the posted workers themselves as part of the cause of their problems, rather then those who are actually to blame — the bosses.
The union officials at Staythorpe and elsewhere are at pains to point out that the workers' demands and slogans are aimed at the Posted Workers Directive not the posted workers themselves. They also say this issue has nothing to do with hostility towards migrant workers in general. When this case is made it is often pointed out that hundreds of migrant workers joined the strikes around the country. That may be true, but it ignores the fact we live in a culture in which anti-migrant racism and prejudice is endemic. Many of the workers probably do not make the distinction between posted workers recruited outside the UK on different terms and conditions, and migrant workers recruited in the UK on local terms and conditions. By a "locally recruited workforce" many workers both inside the industry and in the wider working class actually mean a workforce of British citizens. This is why "British Jobs For British Workers" is such a dangerous and reactionary slogan to raise.
One thing that seems to confuse many who look at the workers in this industry from the outside is how contradictory the statements and slogans seem to be. You can read a trade unionist quoted for the Guardian or Morning Star talking about the trade union issues and disavowing any nationalism. You can also read "British worker racism, jobs for "our" lads" in the Daily Star. It looks almost like a deliberate "twin track approach" from the workers and their unions. Although the ambiguity may be deliberate in some cases, in general it is a sign of confusion and actual political differences amongst the workers and their unions.
Les Bayliss, the assistant General Secretary of Unite has said: "The underpayment of these workers is outrageous. We have demanded that the workers are paid back in full. These revelations are proof that construction workers have genuine concerns which the industry has consistently tried to deny existed. Some workers at Staythorpe were losing out on thousands of pounds in pay that they were rightly owed. Unite will not allow employers to get away with breaking agreements and underpaying its workers, regardless of nationality."
Whilst we have many criticisms of Bayliss, this is a better emphasis to the one taken by many on the Bearfacts rank-and-file online forum. The demand there has been to throw Somi off the site without any concern to the fate of its workers. There will also be an overlap between reps and activists in the union and Bearfacts contributors; that underlines the situation of confusion.
It also seems that Unite stewards have distanced themselves from the 3 February demo. It has been suggested this is over disagreements with the call for preferential treatment for British workers.
So there is a political struggle among the workers over the demands they should be making and their attitudes towards posted and migrant workers. This struggle can go either way depending on the forces involved and the approach taken. That's why it is vital for socialists to go down to the picket lines and to demos like the one on 3 February.
Socialists need to learn lessons from the interventions made (or not made) in the first Lindsey Oil Refinery strike last year. If we look at the left as a whole we see it related to these workers by sidestepping some or all of the industrial issues and falling into inadequate and even rotten default positions.
One approach was to say these strikes were only about the issue of the Posted Workers Directive, to see only the militant workere under attack. That approach blocked out the reactionary ideas gaining currency, the many expressions of latent and explicit racism and chauvinism. This lowest denominator workerism may have reflected a natural sense of class loyalty, but it allowed the reactionary ideas to go unchallenged.
A second approach was to read the Guardian and watch Newsnight and be so appalled at the depiction of the strikes which often highlighted the reactionary nature of it all, that you refused to engage with these workers on a serious level. Too many socialists implicitly trusted the bourgeois media's account of the strike whilst churning out empty propaganda from a distance. This was not helped by the fact that the left is small and isolated from the working-class and that socialists can fall prey to the middle class prejudices about the white working class.
When it became more obvious that the construction engineering workers were not just racists who wanted to kick foreign workers off site, and they were fighting against serious attacks on a national agreement that ought to protect all workers, and and on their right to organise, socialist responses improved.
In Workers Liberty we talked to workers when we could (which was not often enough). We engaged in discussion on the Bearfacts website. And we did our own research. One problem with much of the propaganda produced for the strikers was it tended to be the strike committee's demands plus general propagandist socialist slogans with no link between the two. A worker at Lindsey may have been persuaded by such propaganda that the workers of the world should unite, but still want preferential recruitment for "locals" as an immediate demand. This is why socialists need to have both insight into the working lives of people in the industry. That is the only way to help develop relevant but militant demands that can solve the problems that all workers in Europe face. These demands need to both be concrete and realisable, as well as developing the struggle for workers to take power into their own hands.
These demands should include:
•All workers regardless of legal status to be covered by the national union agreement.
•Open the books. Access by the workers to all contractors' and sub-contractors' pay rolls and accounts
•Direct employment; replacing (whenever possible) sub-contracting with direct employment.
•Decent training and apprenticeships; the government and the industry to pay for proper, well funded training for all workers.
•End blacklisting! We need genuinely effective legislation against blacklisting. Companies caught blacklisting should be expropriated by the state under workers control.
•The unions to ensure "posted workers" with union membership in their country of origin automatically get a temporary transfer to a British union for their period of "posting".
•Segregation on sites must end and union officials must have access to posted workers to help organise and represent these workers. The employers to pay for interpreters when necessary.
•European wide law to guarantee "posted" workers 'level up' to local terms and conditions, when these are better then their terms and conditions they are already on.
•A Construction Labour Scheme with hiring from a register kept by the unions. There should be a basic industry wage for registered workers when not currently on a job. This scheme must be open equally to all workers who apply regardless of "origin" or status.