Engineering construction

Industry and workers

Sparks vote to strike

Electricians working for Balfour Beatty Engineering Services have voted by 81% to take strike action in their battle against their employer’s attempt to unilaterally withdraw from the Joint Industry Board (JIB), the body which oversees union-negotiated pay and conditions. Balfour Beatty, along with six other major mechanical and electrical construction contractors, are proposing to replace the JIB with a new agreement, the “Building Engineering Services National Agreement” (BESNA), which is not union-negotiated. Workers currently employed by the seven contractors have been told they have until...

Site workers gain confidence

Four hundred workers took part in a protest on Monday 26 September at the Lindsey Oil Refinery as the campaign against the plan by eight big contractors to cut pay for construction electricians continues. The 400 included some workers from West Burton and Saltend who had taken wildcat strike action to join the protest. Protests were also held at the Manchester Town Hall construction site and the Tyne Tunnel site in Newcastle (where the tunnel was briefly blockaded) on 22 September. Workers focused on leafleting workers going into the sites; building up organisation and union membership among...

Rank-and-file leads construction fight: unions must ballot for action

By a supporter of the Site Worker paper Eight major contractors are proposing to cut the hourly rate of pay by up to 35% for some parts of the job. Currently the Joint Industry Board sets a £16.25 per hour rate across the board, but the eight companies want to leave the JIB and set rates of £10.50 per hour for metalworking, £12 for wiring and £14 for finishing. These contractors are the ones with the most work in the industry, so a lot of workers will be effected by this. If they get away with it then other contractors will follow suit. This has been on the cards for a long time, but people...

Construction bosses go to war against workers

The UK’s major electrical and mechanical contractors have launched an unprecedented attack on collective bargaining by attempting to unilaterally impose a new agreement on the industry. The contractors, which include industry leaders such as Balfour Beatty, wrote to workers in late July announcing their intention to impose new agreements. The new agreement, if imposed, will lead to a significant deskilling and arbitrary downgrading by industry bosses. It will also give managers an enormous amount of direct control over hours, breaks and pay procedure, as well as containing a no-strike clause...

Behind the Saltend defeat

More information has filtered out about the defeat of the locked-out engineering construction workers at the biofuels site being built at Saltend, near Hull, by the BP-led consortium Vivergo. On 14 March, 400 workers were told that the contractor employing them, Redhall, had been thrown off the job by Vivergo. They picketed the site, demonstrated, and appealed for and got some solidarity action, but in May they accepted a pay-off. According to the trade journal The Engineer, the pay-off is from Redhall, which is suing Vivergo over the termination of their contract; according to the Socialist...

Saltend ends

The Saltend workers’ dispute has come to a frustrating end after nearly three months. The 400 locked-out construction workers failed to win back their jobs at the refinery site in Hull after their employer Redhall Services Ltd was axed by the Vivergo consortium. Vivergo has improved the payout it was offering workers, and most have now accepted. Certainly, it would not have done that without sustained picketing at the site and other action elsewhere. But if the dispute had been spread to other sites, the workers may have won more. The national shop stewards’ forum for the engineering...

Saltend workers in court protest

Saltend workers demonstrated outside Hull Magistrates’ Court hearing on 17 May for GMB national officer Phil Whitehurst who was arrested on a picket on 4 May. Whitehurst had been taking part in the regular pickets over the lockout of 430 workers from the failed £200m Vivergo Fuels Ltd bio-ethanol fuel plant project. A group of about 30 workers and trade unionists protested outside the Court before going inside for Whitehurst’s hearing. Entering to a round of applause, he was charged under section 14 of the Public Order act, used by the police to limit the number of people at a protest to...

BP locks out engineering construction workers

A senior GMB union official was arrested on 4 May as police stepped up their attempts to break up protests by locked-out workers at the Saltend biofuels plant construction site. Workers have been demonstrating since 14 March, when their employer — Redhall Engineer Solutions — had its contract with Vivergo, the BP-led consortium building the plant, terminated. Although Redhall told the workers they should turn up for work as normal, and that they would be transferred via TUPE into employment by Vivergo or by another contractor, they found themselves locked-out and without work. Workers employed...

Engineering construction: correction and update

In our article on conditions in engineering construction ( Solidarity 3-166) it was not unambiguously clear that employers are not using the Posted Workers Directive as such to attack workers. Rather they have used loopholes in the Posted Workers Directive created by recent European Court of Justice rulings. (We said the Directive had been “amended” by the court). Those rulings — to the surprise of the unions — have established an interpretation of the PWD as guaranteeing posted workers only those terms and conditions which are established by law in the country they are posted to. Because...

New struggles and old issues in construction engineering

An audit demanded by Unite and GMB unions into the pay of workers building a new gas turbine power station at Staythorpe in Nottinghamshire has showed that a sub-contractor (Somi) is paying its Italian workers less than UK rates for the job —by an average of 1,300 euros a month. These workers are “posted workers” — sent by their employer to work in a different country on a temporary basis. Unions believe these workers are being used to undercut wages and conditions in the industry. Staythorpe’s UK workers have been at the forefront of wild cat strike action in the last year, and were on strike...

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