A workers' plan to shut down oilfields

North Sea oil workers have done something that no government or fossil fuel company has even attempted: they have devised a plan for shutting down the oil fields and transitioning to renewable energy.

The Our Power report has emerged from a coalition of environmental groups and trade unions working closely with offshore workers. The plan involves investment in retraining and infrastructure so that oil rigs can be decommissioned in the UK and we can build the wind and marine energy we need for the future.

The collaboration between workers and environmentalists started with a survey organised by environmentalist groups Platform, Friends of the Earth Scotland, and Greenpeace UK in 2020. This survey got an overwhelming response from offshore workers and led to the 2020 report Offshore: Oil and Gas Workers’ Views on Industry Conditions and the Energy Transition.

Offshore workers have to pay thousands of pounds for their own training, including safety critical training, and there is a whole marketplace of for-profit training providers who game the system. Workers wanted standardised training across the sector to allow them to transfer their skills into offshore renewable energy.

The 2020 report led to a joint campaign for an Offshore Training Passport that would allow workers to switch from the fossil fuel industry to wind energy. Through joint campaigning on this issue, environmentalists built the relationships with offshore workers necessary for developing the fuller plan for just transition. In the Our Power report the training demand is expanded to include three years’ protected income and free training to allow workers clear pathways out of high carbon jobs.

Throughout the Our Power report workers describe how the relentless pursuit of profit frustrates a rational transition to clean energy and erodes basic workers rights and safety standards. In 2016 the Gross Value Added per oil or gas worker was calculated at £229,807, but very little of that wealth ends up in the pockets of workers or their communities.

Many workers are precariously employed with bullshit self-employed status. Workers who raise concerns are easily fired, undermining an effective safety culture. The sector is heavily dependent on hyper-exploited migrant workers living on as little as £4.80 an hour and working four to six months at sea without seeing family or friends. Such “wild west” employment practices are being recreated in the offshore wind energy sector.

To fix these problems, workers are demanding a universal rights and wages floor across the UK Continental Shelf regardless of nationality, effective union-enforced grievance and whistleblowing policies, and public ownership.

The UK’s privatised ports are inadequate for the energy transition. Chronic underinvestment means that there is insufficiently large plant to decommission oil rigs or manufacture and process wind turbine platforms, towers, blades and nacelles. Despite the fact the UK has one of the highest levels of offshore wind in the world and plans for massive expansion, it has failed to develop an associated industrial base.

The Tory plans for low regulation “free ports” will further prevent necessary investment. The report details how “new and larger quays, extra laydown space, and the ability to lift larger weights” could allow the UK to produce 80% of its offshore wind turbines and decommission and recycle old oil and gas infrastructure. Public ownership could also allow more ambitious projects like floating offshore wind and tidal power.

Workers are demanding public ownership of wind energy and heavy taxation on fossil fuel companies. At the moment, instead of oil and gas wealth being redistributed to workers and their communities, taxpayers augment the bumper profits of fossil capital with generous subsidies. Between 2015 and 2020 large oil and gas companies received £3.2 billion taxpayers’ money.

The Energy Price Guarantee and Energy Bill Relief Scheme could gift North Sea gas and oil companies over £7 billion in the next six months. Rishi Sunak’s windfall tax contains a loophole that means for that every £100 invested in expanding North Sea fossil fuel extraction, companies will have to pay just £8.75, with the remaining £91.25 being paid by the public.

Frequent comparisons are also made to Norway, where oil wealth was kept in public ownership. Norway now has sovereign wealth fund worth over $1 trillion, funding much of its health and education. The UK has extracted more gas and oil but has no equivalent: the revenue has flowed to private shareholders.

The Our Power report is the first major workers’ plan for the ecological crisis. The idea of just transition was pioneered by US trade union leader Tony Mazzochi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union in the 1990s. Workers’ Liberty activists and our allies within Workers’ Climate Action were energetic in popularising the idea within the Climate Camp movement in the late 2000s.

It is a major step forward that mainstream environmentalist NGOs are adopting this approach and that workers are keen to engage with them.