Vestas

• Come to the protest outside the Vestas factory — Monks Brook, St Cross Industrial Estate, Newport, Isle of Wight. • Send messages of support from yourself or your organisation to savevestas@gmail.com . • Send a donation from your trade union or other organisation, or make a personal donation: cheques payable to Ryde and East Wight Trades Union Council, 22 Church Lane, Ryde, Isle of Wight, PO33 2NB, or donate online at savevestas.wordpress.com . • Contact energy minister Ed Miliband. His phone number in his Doncaster constituency is 01302 875 462, and at Westminster, 020 7219 4778. Flood him...

Climate change is a global issue and the international workers’ movement has responded with messages of solidarity. One of the workers from Vestas is currently visiting Denmark, meeting trade unionists from the Danish parent company. Attempts are being made to get solidarity from the United Steelworkers Union which is trying to organise the workers at the US plant where Vestas plan to move production. At Ssangyong Motors, in Pyeongtaek near Seoul, South Korea, a workers occupation is now in its eighth week (see page 2). They sent this message to Vestas workers: “Ssangyong Motor workers are in...

Doug Green is a locked-out worker from the stores department at the Vestas St Cross factory . Initially, we had our doubts it was going to work. The further we go into this, the more the confidence is going to be built. What’s built my confidence? Public support; support from my family; the press coverage; and the number of people we’re getting down here to support us. This week has reinforced our view on what sort of people we’re dealing with in the Vestas management. We knew they were bastards before, but this has reinforced it. I have been in a union before. I was in Amicus when I worked at...

From Monday evening (20th) to Wednesday (22nd), the police were aggressive and very markedly on the side of Vestas bosses. They were especially hostile on Monday evening, but the aggressiveness continued for a couple of days. In one stand-off, they confronted Vestas worker Doug Green and told him that if he took one step further towards his own workplace, they would arrest him for “breach of the peace” and confiscate the food he was trying to take to the occupiers. Doug stayed put where he was, defying the police, for four hours. Some supporters were arrested for “breach of the peace”, the...

The workers’ occupation at the Vestas wind turbine blade factory at Newport, Isle of Wight, is the centre of three great battles: on jobs, on the environment, and on renovating the labour movement. Workers occupied the factory on Monday 20 July to stop the bosses’ plans to shut the factory. Vestas bosses and police have been able to stop all but a few extra workers entering the factory to join the occupation, but hundreds of other workers and supporters have gathered outside the factory entrance to support the occupiers and demand the nationalisation of the factory to save jobs. Vestas bosses...

I’ve been thinking about solidarity activism around Vestas, after experiencing and talking about recent disputes like the tube cleaners, Visteon, SOAS occupation; comparing student occupations, workers occupations and things like climate camp, learning about some of the history of working-class direct action. Every group and individual seems to come at these struggles with differing ideas of what solidarity means and looks like, or as we often put it, “how solidarity can change the world”. I spent a good part of last year developing the WCA [Workers' Climate Action] network; what’s at stake in...

One of the first AWL activists to start activity around the Vestas wind turbine factory closures looks back over six weeks of campaigning. I remember first hearing about Vestas at the Workers’ Liberty conference back in May. Some comrades in student and youth fraction told us about a wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight which was being shut down and we decided that someone should go down to make contacts and see what, if anything, could be done in terms of organising a fightback. A shortened version of this diary is published in Solidarity 3/156. Why did we decide this? Well, in the first...

At the hearing in Newport, IoW, on 29 July, the judge refused to grant Vestas a "possession order" for the occupied factory, and adjourned the case to 4 August.

The BBC is reporting that Vestas management have sacked the 11 workers involved in the occupation that they have so far been able to identify. After coordinating a police blockade to prevent any food from getting to the occupying workers, Vestas management eventually relented and have been delivering food (initially only cold, pre-packaged food in insufficient quantities) to the workers. Tonight, dismissal letters were delivered with the evening pizza. Mike, an occupying worker, said "it's not going to deter us and we're not going to leave. We're not doing this for us now, we're doing this for...

Although a student sit-in is different from a workplace takeover, there is much to learn from the successful occupation by the Harvard University students' campaign for a living wage for campus workers in 2001. These are excerpts from an article by Amy Offner on the lessons of that sit-in. On the inside, the major task of the first few days was just holding the space. The police did not try to drag everyone out, but made it very difficult for us to stay inside and function. For instance, they prevented people from leaving the room they were in to go to the bathroom, and they forced their way...