The engineering construction strikes in Britain,2009

Introduction

Conventional industrial relations wisdom predicts that in times of economic contraction, where there is a greater abundance of workers than there is demand, strike activity is less likely (Jackson, 1991). The recession in Britain from late-2007 would seem to confirm this, with the number of strikes and days not worked per annum falling to under 100 and 0.5m respectively in both 2009 and 2010 (ONS, 2011), and surveys by employer groups (such as the Confederation of British Industry) and independent analysts (such as Incomes Data Services) indicating the significant extent to which pay freezes and cuts and non-compensated short-time working arrangements have been accepted by workers as a ‘necessary evil’ to preserve jobs. Indeed, on many occasions these arrangements were suggested by the workers’ unions themselves. Obvious exceptions to this acquiescence and ‘sharing out’ of misery were the three engineering construction workers’ strikes of 2009, despite estimated unemployment rates of 25-30 per cent in the industry (Financial Times, 19, 20 June 2009). These strikes were unofficial, unlawful and militant, involving mass picketing, secondary action, flying pickets and many thousands of workers. Consequently, one could suggest that the threat of unemployment could be interpreted as more of a spur than an obstacle to this collective industrial action. Moreover, the strikes gained significant concessions, an outcome uncommon in the current period.

This article examines these strikes in order to present an explanation of why they were a manifest ‘exception to the rule’. In order to do so, it examines the nature of the engineering construction industry (ECI) labour market, its cycles of construction activity and its regime of regulation, as well as the traditions and dynamics of labour unionism contained therein, to unpick the strikes’ context, processes and dynamics. Consequently, and in regard of the latter, the article examines longstanding concerns of industrial relations research revolving around internal union dynamics, workplace unionism and union governance and democracy within evolving and dynamic labour markets and capital structures. The key finding of this article is that a complex web of factors explains the capacity and capability of the ECI workers to undertake these, but at their centre are the phenomena of the regime of regulation when allied to industry identity and industry class consciousness. ‘Capacity’ refers to the fragility of the sub-system by which the ECI works, prone to disruption, while ‘capability’ refers to the ability of ECI workers to take advantage of this configuration (see Gall, 2003: 131). The article also examines the issue of the strikes’ alleged xenophobia, an allegation that gave the strikes considerable media potency, thus, ensuring both notoriety and controversy. In this regard, throughout the article, the term ‘domiciled workers’ is used to denote workers in the domestic ECI labour market who, whatever their nationality or ethnic origin, are available for work. This is to differentiate them from those from the external or international labour markets, again of whatever their nationality or ethnic origin, who are specifically brought into the domestic ECI labour market from outside it.

The research materials deployed are drawn from a number of primary and secondary sources. One is ten first-hand testimonies by grassroots strike organisers. These testimonies were collected after the beginning of the first strike and focused largely upon those involved in the Lindsey disputes, the epicentre of the major actions. The second are seven interviews with key employed union officers (EUOs) in the two unions concerned, the GMB and Unite. The third is attendance at four meetings at which strike organisers gave reports and accounts of their activities, progress made to date, and the challenges encountered. These were held in London, and were support group meetings rather than the daily site meetings of the Lindsey site, for example. The fourth are weekly members’ bulletins circulated jointly by the GMB and Unite unions following a request to the EUO of the major union, Unite. The fifth are official documents and press releases of the GMB and Unite national unions. These were then supplemented by secondary sources ranging from Incomes Data Services, an ACAS report, the Guardian and Financial Times, the Morning Star, the Socialist and the Socialist Worker. Together, these materials provide a robust basis upon which to construct the analysis contained herein. The article proceeds by discussing the nature of the political economy of employment relations in the ECI before moving to examine the prevalence of open workplace conflict in it. This provides a foundation upon which the 2009 strikes can be outlined and examined. The final parts of the article examine the issue of xenophobia and offer an explanation for the mobilising ability of the ECI workers.

The engineering construction industry

The ECI has employed some 20,000-30,000 skilled and semi-skilled workers over the last two decades in the construction (fabrication, installation) and maintenance (but not operation) of large production facilities like power stations (nuclear, coal or oil fired), oil refineries, chemical plants, and gas processing plants. The workforce skills required are certified through an industry training board and include steel erecting, welding, pipefitting and fabricating, along with electrical and mechanical engineering. Around 1,500 migrant workers are believed to work in the industry as domiciled workers (Financial Times, 20 June 2009; see also IDS, 2009). Notwithstanding the normal capitalist imperative to accumulate profit, the ECI’s primary economic dynamic is anti-cyclical since the conventional business cycle for the not-inconsiderable investment for new-build capital projects is decided years in advance, construction takes many years, and work is commissioned on the basis of contracts that include significant financial penalties for delay and non-completion. For decades, a complex system of subcontracting has operated. Typically, the client for whom the facility is to be built and then run appoints a main contractor as the project manager, and this company then sub-contracts different parts and stages of the build to other companies, who may in turn contract work out to others based on skill requirements. Although there is no necessary correlation between the temporal nature of commercial contracts and the nature of employment contracts used within the ECI, this being a matter of employer choice, the norm is for workers to be employed for temporary periods, ranging from a few to many months, on an ‘as and when needed’ basis by sub-contractors. Consequently, there is little permanent employment as sub-contractors only employ core staffs. (Additionally, the use of agency workers has increased over the last two decades.) It is for this reason that workers strove over many years to establish the ‘custom and practice’ convention under which workers who are to be made redundant by one contractor when its contract ends are then taken on by others for other contracts, to maintain their continuity of employment (IDS, 2009).

Like much of the construction industry, the ECI maintains multi-employer collective bargaining, ¹ indicating that despite the growth of the centralisation and concentration of capital in the industry, a plethora of small and medium enterprises continue to exist, these being the many sub-contractors. As such, and to exert control over labour costs (through taking this basic remuneration out as a factor of competition between different units of capital), multi-employer bargaining has continued. But unlike the rest of the construction industry, it also remains heavily unionised (at around 70 per cent density), and the creation of the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry (NAECI) in 1981 represented the re-centralisation of collective bargaining at the industry level. The NAECI was created after a period in which de facto decentralised bargaining had led to significant tensions and conflicts on inter-company (between clients and contractors) and intra-company (between employer and workers) bases (Korczynski, 1997). ² These disputes arose from bargaining in the 1970s comprising ‘wage drift’ from the national agreement and ‘pay leapfrogging’, and were based on encroachment upon managerial and national union power through the establishment of workplace unionism and shopfloor militancy (Korczynski, 1997). The NAECI was an attempt by both employers through their federation, the Engineering Construction Industry Association (ECIA), and national unions to wrest control back from the shop floor as well as make the locus of all negotiation (de jure and de facto) at the industry level. In this context, ACAS (2009: 3) stated that the NAECI was established ‘in order to prevent unofficial disputes’. Thus, the NAECI established that pay rates were actual pay rates and that the sole role allocated to site determination was that of monitoring and enforcement of the NAECI through local joint employer-union councils of the NAECI.

The NAECI arrangement as an instrument of recentralising control was successfully enforced upon unwilling members and stewards (Korczynski, 1997), but stewards nonetheless maintained their own intra- and inter-site networks in contravention of the NAECI (and despite the challenge of having long-term pay deals which further narrowed the terrain on which workplace unionism could exist). One response of clients and contractors to the maintenance of workplace unionism has been ‘blacklisting’ and victimisation against perceived militants and ‘troublemakers’ (Ewing, 2009; Guardian, 6 March 2009). ³ Nonetheless, the NAECI has until recently been viewed as a success for employers, and arguably also for national unions, in terms of delivering upon its objectives of installing stability through significantly reducing open shop-floor conflict (IDS, 2009). Indeed, until 2009, there had been only one threat of a national ballot for industrial action (in 2004). Finally, and of portent for the 2009 strikes, the 2007-2009 NAECI introduced alterations to existing arrangements to provide solutions for short-term labour resourcing issues, and to aid recruitment and retention in anticipation of growth in new-build investment. These included enabling contractors looking to source short-term labour to use agency workers on the basis that employment agencies follow the same rules as contractors in order to prevent undercutting.

Pre-history

The 2009 strikes have a distinctive pre-history, indicating both a mobilising capability and regarding the issues at hand. Thus the issue of ensuring that work (subject to skill requirements) was made available to domiciled labour paid at nationally agreed (NAECI) rates and conditions, in order to stop the exploitation of overseas workers and the undercutting of both existing workers’ terms and condition and the NAECI itself, is not a recent phenomenon. For example, the engineering construction unions (NECC, 2005) raised the issue of the potential use of the Posted Worker Regulations (PWR) for undercutting in 2005. Then, in January 2008, Unite organised a demonstration in Manchester demanding that construction employers use workers covered by national agreements and directly employed. Unite (2008) warned of ‘social unrest’ if these issues were not adequately addressed and resolved.

In terms of strikes, a number of contemporaneous events are illustrative. In 2006, workers at a power station struck unofficially for three weeks against the undercutting of pay and conditions through the use of Hungarian workers (see also Lillie and Nathan, 2007: 570), while there were sizeable unofficial strikes at a liquid natural gas plant in 2006 and at another such plant in 2007. In 2008, an unofficial one-day walkout at a power plant took place following the dismissal of workers who picketed out their colleagues, on the basis that they were being replaced by cheaper Polish workers. Later in the same year, scaffolders at the same site walked out over health and safety concerns related to unqualified overseas workers being used, and were dismissed. Other scaffolders walked out in their support.

Also of note have been a number of strikes by construction workers against racism (see, for example, Socialist Worker, 25 September 2007). Thus, unofficial walkouts were far from being unheard of (see also Korczynski and Ritson, 2000: 430), with there being almost no official strikes, and the causes of the strikes have an affinity with those of 2009. There is doubt as to whether the overall ECI strike incidence has been captured by the Office for National Statistics (see Table 1) for the Financial Times (6 February 2009), reported strikes in 2007-2008 in the industry accounted for one day per worker, and the box ‘Anatomy of the strikes’ (below) indicates a slightly higher level of activity for 2009 on the first two measures. Finally, all three strikes in 2009 existed on the common foundation of a national campaign against the exclusion of domiciled workers. Thus, towards the end of 2008 and into 2009, the NECC (National Engineering Construction Committee [of Unite and GMB unions]) National Shop Stewards Forum held meetings to move the issue up the national agenda of the two unions, and organised demonstrations outside sites where contractors were excluding domiciled workers, particularly at the Staythorpe construction site. The significance of this campaign was that it brought together stewards and activists, and it did so in a way that was pro-active and based on collective mobilisation, representing a grassroots initiative.

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Table 1.

Strikes in the construction industry (SIC45), 2001-2010

Year	Days not worked	Workers involved	Number of strikes
2010	800	400	1
2009	59,200	14,600	7
2008	2,700	2,700	4
2007	2,300	800	4
2006	15,100	1,800	5
2005	1,700	900	3
2004	100	100	1
2003	13,900	1,900	4
2002	16,800	16,800	3
2001	9,800	2,900	9

Source: Economic and Labour Market Review and Labour Market Trends (various)

The strikes

The strikes involved unofficial walkouts, whereby those workers who experienced the initial grievance walked out without balloting, ⁴ setting in train a process whereby other workers on-site and off-site also walked out without balloting in solidarity and sympathy. An itemisation of these strikes follows:

The grievances

The common, intertwined threads running through the disputes-cum-strikes were a) the right to work; b) employment and job security; and c) protection of, and adherence, to NAECI terms and conditions. The right to work concerned the bringing on site of non-domiciled workers – that is, workers brought in especially from outside Britain – to fill vacancies on terms and conditions below those set by the NAECI. The strikers believed that the implication was that not only was local labour, defined as already domiciled labour of any nationality, being denied access to employment opportunities at a time of growing unemployment, but that the recruitment of these non-domiciled workers on inferior terms and conditions was a means of undermining their (domiciled) terms and conditions of employment, and the mechanisms by which they were set. The strikers’ demands were for all labour to be employed on NAECI terms, and for local labour – defined as already domiciled labour – to be used before any other labour was hired. One particular aspect of this concerned providing local labour with employment security by guaranteeing the right of transfer from one stage of project work to another.

In the first strike, redundancy notices were served by one contractor (Shaws) due to the ending of a contract by the client because of contractor delays, while another contractor (IREM), which was awarded this transferred work, stated it would only employ its own staff – Portuguese and Polish workers specifically brought into Britain – for the work. This contractor was not unionised (Meardi, 2012) and was believed to be flouting NAECI terms and conditions (which, tellingly, ACAS [2009] was unable to refute ⁵ ). In the second strike, the contractor stated that it was forced to employ foreign workers especially brought in from abroad to fill vacant posts (through a sub-contractor) that could not be filled using extant domiciled labour. This was contrary to the Supplementary Project Agreement between the two unions and all the contractors where local labour is used first, and appeared to be a deliberate action to bypass the agreement. The strikers believed that the Polish workers in this case were being employed, again, on inferior pay and conditions. The strikers’ demand was that domiciled labour be used on NAECI rates, as per their agreement. They did not demand the sacking of the Polish workers (as Hertel and its sub-contractor subsequently did). In the third strike, one contractor made redundancies while another had just previously taken on the same type of skilled workers, so the strikers argued that this flouted the agreement that settled the first Lindsey strike. To add insult to injury, the jobs being created were as a result of that strike settlement. Moreover, the GMB (2009c) alleged that this was a deliberate attempt to punish the workers for initiating that strike and to prevent them from gaining employment, and from being in a position to curtail managerial prerogative in future.

Prior to and throughout the three strikes there were frequent national mobilisations of ECI workers via demonstrations (on-site, in regional cities, at the Westminster Parliament, and company headquarters in London) against the two contractors and their subcontractors concerning the building of power stations at Staythorpe, Newark and the Isle of Grain. The four sub-contractors consistently refused to employ domiciled labour, instead bringing in their own permanently employed (Polish, Spanish) workers on pay rates below the NAECI. One contractor, Remak, at the Isle of Grain, was found to be undercutting NAECI rates by 28.5 per cent and forcing its workers to pay for their own protective clothing and equipment (GMB, 2009a; Unite, 2009a). But after sustained campaigning, the sub-contractors began to employ a limited amount of local domiciled labour (Unite, 2009b). The campaign also led to these workers being paid on NAECI rates (with lost back pay as well), and many joined Unite and the GMB.

The momentum for the mobilisations was grassroots-based and it was this pressure which also led to internal union mobilisation for an industry-wide national strike over the issues of the right to work, employment security and undercutting. The GMB stated after the first Lindsey strike that it was prepared to sanction an official strike ballot to that end if its stewards decided that was an appropriate course of action (GMB, 2009b). And as negotiations for the renewal of the NAECI made little progress, the GMB and Unite both stated they would organise ballots for national industrial action over the employers’ terms for renewal. The employers proposed a wage freeze and rejected calls for union auditing of sub-contractor workforces. ⁶

Social dynamics of the strikes

The internal dynamics of the strikes were complex and multi-faceted, operating at least at four quasi-distinct levels, these being: a) grassroots members and activists; b) stewards (through the NECC National Shop Stewards Forum and the Unite engineering construction shops stewards forum); c) local and regional EUOs; and d) national unions in the shape of national EUOs. Each of these milieus had a relationship with the others, although the relationships with proximate milieus were more manifest for each, and each was subject to different contending pressures. In each of the strikes, those groups of workers initially affected took deliberate and conscious action to bring out their fellow workers on the same site. This involved a mixture of walking out, which allowed strikers to then speak to fellow workers, lobbying their stewards to hold meetings to decide upon further site walkouts by other workers, and picketing out fellow workers. For example, in the first Lindsey strike, when IREM categorically stated it would not employ any of the ‘at risk’ Shaw’s workers, the affected workers called for a strike at a convened meeting, to which their (official) stewards’ committee recommended staying ‘within procedure’ of the NAECI disputes mechanism. But when the assembled workers voted to walk out, the entire stewards’ committee (on advice from Unite EUOs) resigned in order to distance the union from ‘unlawful action’. An unofficial strike committee was then elected which formulated the strikers’ demands following approval at a mass meeting on the strike’s third day. These were: no victimisation for taking solidarity action; all ECI workers in Britain to be covered by the NAECI agreement; union controlled registering of unemployed and locally skilled union members, with nominating rights as work becomes available; government and employer investment in proper training/apprenticeships for a new generation of ECI workers; all migrant labour to be unionised; union assistance for immigrant workers – including interpreters – and access to union advice to promote active integrated union members; and building links with construction unions on the continent.

The on-site (internal) and off-site (external) solidarity strikes were spread through flying pickets, text messages ⁷ , websites (like Bearfacts), telephone calls and site-gate meetings, where the balance was tilted towards site-gate meetings to consider requests for solidarity action (rather than refusing to cross picket lines established by flying pickets). In this situation, the means of escalation do not explain the reasons why requests were met positively. Rather, these concern not just the ability of the initial strikers to present their grievances as having universal purchase but to do so in an environment of supportive factors of economic and social commonality (see discussion below). The mass meetings of initial and sympathy strikes were a mixture of daily meetings to review the progress of the dispute and the workers’ response (such as whether to stay out) to negotiating developments, and meetings every few days if the previous meeting had decided that the strikers would stay out for a defined length of time. The levels of attendance at these meetings and the subsequent on-site demonstrations, blockades and mass pickets suggested that the majority of strikers were active in the strike (compared to many other strikes where the majority is passive, treating the strike as a leisure day or holiday). This gives a sense of what the ‘grassroots’ meant here, namely, both engaged and active in the determination and prosecution of the strikes. Amongst the grassroots, an organic leadership emerged which was not synonymous with stewards (see above and below).

This grassroots dynamic indicated a specific (if temporary) tension between the members and stewards in many cases. Grassroots members and activists favoured immediate action and escalation, sensing that their grievances were perishable and that they must strike while ‘the iron was hot’. Meantime, stewards often (unsuccessfully) advised against walkouts and their continuation because they were advised, in turn, by EUOs that to do otherwise would be to act outside the NAECI or site-defined procedures, and the actions would be both unofficial and unlawful. Specifically, stewards were warned by EUOs that if they did not advise against such action, they could negate the repudiation of the action by the unions, rendering their national union liable to legal action by an employer and, thus, possible fines and sequestration of assets. However, other cases exist in which stewards did not discharge their functions as instructed or expected, and gave varying degrees of explicit and implicit support to strikers. In the case of the second Lindsey strike, this was all the more evident, for once the mass sackings took place, the disputes with the two concerned contractors were declared official by the two unions (even if the strikes were not).

The relationship between the grassroots and the national unions (local, regional and national EUOs) was often a strained one, for reasons related to the status of the industrial action. Yet the picture was far more complex than this. In all the strikes, the two national unions repudiated the unofficial actions, but that did not mean they had no positive involvement, nor that their involvement was unproblematic. The national unions played the role of public advocate, political representative and negotiator for the strikers without being involved in the organising of the strikes and solidarity action themselves. Public advocacy related to media work where the unions criticised the employers and supported the strikers (rather than condemning them), political representation concerned reforming the PWR and the negotiating role related to bargaining with the client and contractors for an agreeable settlement. Thus, as one employment lawyer put it, Unite and the GMB were ‘saying ‘No’ [to the strike] while [in effect] nodding their heads [in agreement with it]’ (Financial Times, 5 February 2009). But tensions arose most strongly over the control of the disputes, specifically terms for settlement and means by which to exert the fullest leverage upon employers. For example, the national unions commonly recommended returns-to-work by the sympathy strikers after the first two or three days of striking, with the message that the workers had made their point and should now return while the national unions conducted negotiations. ⁸ In contrast, the unofficial strike committees encouraged maximum and continued levels of such active support as a means to directly influence the negotiations between their national unions and employers. Thus, the Guardian (5 February 2009) reported: ‘One [national union] official admitted …“We are trying to get some control on the thing”’, while the Financial Times (22 May 2009) reported that a GMB EUO was shocked by the speed of escalation and self-initiative of grassroots. Yet while one would expect national officers to be less involved on the ground, it was noticeable how involved regional EUOs were, for there were meetings between these EUOs and stewards on constructions sites, and information about the strikes was spread between the sites via official channels, effectively encouraging solidarity action (although there seemed to be little coordination between Unite and the GMB in this regard).

The greatest example of internal tension took place over the conduct of the negotiations in the first Lindsey strike. Thus, in the first meeting between Total and the strike committee, the employers kept looking at their watches. When asked why the meeting was being cut short, they said they had a meeting to go to with nation union officials and ACAS in Scunthorpe. This was news to the strike committee, and they immediately organised to go there with other strikers, demanding to be let into the negotiations. As one testimony recounted,

The strike committee only found out through the management that two national officials from Unite and the GMB were in talks with ACAS in Scunthorpe. Fifty strikers set out for Scunthorpe, where the officials were ensconced in a hotel with ACAS. When the strikers got there they were blocked from the hotel by police. Only by smuggling a note past the police did the strikers get the national officials to come out and talk to them. As a result the strike committee forced their way to the table to ensure that no deals are done behind their backs.

However, in the second Lindsey strike, these tensions were far fewer because the boundaries of relationships had been agreed as a result of the first strike, and because the effect of the dismissals forced the strikers and national unions together. The import of this discussion of the (internal) social dynamics of the strikes is that they cannot convincingly be portrayed or understood simply as ‘a revolt from below’ or a case of the ‘rank-and-file versus the trade union bureaucracy’. Rather, while the strikes were grassroots-initiated, a considerable degree of mutual dependence, compatibility and antagonism can be identified between the different (more than two) levels within each union.

Sympathy action

The on- and off-site sympathy strikes were premised upon the notion that such action would help apply pressure on the salient employers to resolve the issues in favour of the initial strikers. This had a number of dimensions. The sympathy strikers were receptive to the grievance, framing it as universal to themselves and fellow workers, so the message of ‘you could be next’ struck a chord. In this sense, the appeal was to both self-interest and altruism. What is particularly salient is that the sympathy strikers believed – at considerable cost to themselves in lost wages – that taking such action in the context of being employed by various contractors was the ‘right thing to do’, and could have the effect of applying pressure on a number of specific contractors which were external to themselves. Their actions caused delays to projects for which their employing contractors were responsible, but did not have a direct bearing upon the concerned contractors in the disputes, suggesting that their purpose was to create a political (rather than economic) leverage over the clients and the ECIA in the belief that they would then exert pressure upon the contractors in the dispute. Events bore this out, for in both Lindsey strikes, the ECIA and Total became involved. In both Lindsey strikes, Total, on behalf of itself and the concerned contractors, refused to engage in negotiations on the issues at hand until the strikers returned to work. On both occasions, it reversed this position as a result of this external pressure.

Underlying the shared sense of common grievance were several factors, where the sense of grievance was necessary but far from sufficient to explain the sympathy action. These factors cohered around both the culture and organisation of solidarity amongst ECI workers. On the basis of heavy prior unionisation, both cross- and inter-site networks of official stewards existed, which were supplemented by parallel forms of unofficial activist networks which acted to pressure stewards or, on occasion, act independently of them. The cohering amongst grassroots members was predicated on a common generic identity – despite a multitude of specific skills – as skilled and semi-skilled workers, sometimes referred colloquially to as ‘bears’. This has been augmented by the intermingling of workers as a result of having worked together on different projects where they live ⁹ and work together for short but intense periods of time, and then meet again every few years as acquaintances rather than as strangers. Together, consciousness of identity and the distinct spatial dimensions of extra-work social interaction have helped form a strong sense of industrial community. This has been further reified by the levelling effect of the NAECI, which sets de facto common terms, and conditions for ECI employers are required by a historically effective voluntary code to be members and abide by its agreements.

Effective and militant as the sympathy action proved to be, there were several limitations to it. The primary one was that no generation, production or distribution workers of, or working for, the concerned clients took action. ¹⁰ These workers are subject to different bargaining structures (company and intra-company) and employment conditions (permanent contracts), so that their solidarity would be far more difficult to gain. Consequently, the strikers were unable to land a ‘knockout blow’ on clients like Total. This partly explained why the two Lindsey strikes lasted as long as they did. More importantly, the agreements that ended the strikes did not provide for labour audits ¹¹ (GMB 2009a, 2009b) or the right of transfer, and were particular to the concerned contractors and not national agreements (despite ECIA involvement). Indeed, the GMB (2009d) stated that the (second) Lindsey deal had not been not fully implemented several months after its signing; and after the first Lindsey strike, although the ECIA issued a (voluntary) Code of Practice encouraging its non-UK members to employ domiciled labour first, this was eroded by its subsequent comments about the unlawfulness of such a practice and the ECIA’s willingness take legal action to prevent an industrial action ballot by GMB and Unite to enforce this. Thus, the ECI workers were liable to have to fight the same battles again with other contractors, particularly as the PWR (and associated European Court of Justice decisions) provided employers with the lawful basis with which to bring in non-domiciled workers on rates below the NAECI (which itself was merely a voluntary agreement). ¹²

Employer response

Other than the dismissal of the striking Shaw and Jacob workers in the second Lindsey strike, the nature of the employer response, particularly from the contractors, to what was widely characterised as ‘militancy’ was less draconian than might otherwise have been expected. For example, employers affected by (unofficial) sympathy action did not sack these workers (either en masse or selectively as employment law allows) other than in one case, and there were no applications for court injunctions against unions or individuals given that there may have been a prima facie case for doing so despite formal repudiations. This suggests that contractors did not wish to provoke escalation (as the Jacob mass dismissals occasioned) and did not wish to engage in disputes of their own with their (own) workers by taking disciplinary action against them. Client pressure to do otherwise was only likely to have happened when delays to contracted work reached a critical point (or where power generation and production were affected by the sympathy action of production workers). On only the odd occasion was sympathy action taken by production workers in chemical plants, and on no occasion was sympathy action taken by power generation workers. The one exception to the absence of this kind of client intervention was the second Lindsey strike, whereby Total instructed one of its contractors not to hire workers from another because they were ‘an unruly workforce who had taken part in unofficial disputes and who won’t work weekends’ (GMB, 2009c). Total then supported the two contractors that dismissed their workers where it appeared that this was a conscious and coordinated attempt by the two major contractors (if not Total) to break the strikers’ resistance. But even then, the other seven contractors employed by Total did not sack their strikers (which accounted for the level of dismissals being revised down from 900 to 647 between 18 and 19 June 2009).

British jobs for British workers?

During the first Lindsey strike, and from the initial placards on the pickets and demonstrations, the slogan that stood out most clearly above all others in the media reporting of the strike was ‘British jobs for British workers’ (hereafter, ‘BJ4BW’). Indeed, at the outset it seemed to be just about the only slogan emanating from the strikers, and due to the continued usage of these images by the media, transcended more than just the first few days of striking. Did it mean that this was a demand of the strike, and that the strike itself was racist and xenophobic? The BJ4BW slogan (and other imitations) owed its origins to the attempt to make political capital out of the phraseology of the promise coined by then prime minister and Labour leader, Gordon Brown, at the 2007 Labour Party conference in his remarks about training and the labour market. The strikers used the BJ4BW slogan as a ‘skit’ to try to exert some political leverage over the government by taking up its phrase and trying to put pressure on them to deliver upon it by intervening in the strike. Following the government’s spending billions of pounds of public money in bailing out banks and indemnifying them against their losses, the strikers sought to make the point that they too demanded government protection. This did not necessarily imply racist or xenophobic motivation. But the specific reason for the use of the slogan was that the strike began in highly specific circumstances.

The first strike at Lindsey concerned IREM’s practice of exclusively using Italian and Portuguese workers specifically brought into Britain for this work, and excluding local labour workers, whether British or non-British. ¹³ So this was not a strike against the use of overseas workers per se, and the strikers did not call for the expulsion, repatriation or sacking of ‘foreign’ workers. Thus, the use of the slogan was an attempt to gain tactical leverage, but using just five words to encapsulate a more complex grievance was problematic vis-à-vis others’ interpretations. The fuller demand that could not easily be encapsulated in a slogan nor fit easily onto a placard concerned, thus, the right of domiciled workers in Britain – whether ‘British’ or not – to be eligible to apply for vacant work on construction sites in Britain (as opposed to demanding the right to get the jobs).

But just as telling as this aspect was that the BJ4BW slogan came about because of the resignation by the stewards at the strike’s very outset, which led to a vacuum amongst the workers in terms of leadership, taking two or three days for an unofficial strike committee to be established and to exert itself. On the fourth day, the strikers adopted the committee’s demands (see above). There were also almost no Unite banners and placards initially because of the unofficial, unlawful nature of the strike from which the stewards had acted to distance themselves. In was into this initial vacuum that some workers downloaded posters from the Bearfacts website to use on the demonstrations and pickets. After the strike committee asserted itself, the slogans on the placards changed to ‘Fair access for local labour’ where ‘local’ meant already domiciled worker, and was not a cipher for ‘British’ or white ‘British’ workers. The two unions then repeatedly made statements like, ‘Our fight is with the employers who want to tear up our [NAECI] agreement and undermine our hard won conditions at Staythorpe and wherever else. Not with the workers they seek to exploit’ (Unite/GMB, 2009a: 3; see also GMB, 2009b). ¹⁴

Nonetheless, the media consciously chose to use the BJ4BW visually and verbally as the hook upon which to hang reporting of the strike, either as a result of their own political projects or their chosen discourses. An example of this concerns the 10 o’clock news on BBC1 on 2 February 2009, where the political editor commented, ‘Beneath the anger, ministers fear, lies straightforward xenophobia’, followed by a cut to a striker saying, ‘These Portuguese and Eyeties [Italians] – we can’t work alongside of them’. Just half an hour later, Paul Mason on BBC Newsnight used the same excerpt in full: ‘These Portuguese and Eyeties – we can’t work alongside of them: we’re segregated from them. They’re coming in in full companies’. The BBC on 6 February 2009 apologised for the portrayal of the worker as racist. This is not to suggest that there was no racism or xenophobia involved. Inevitably, there would have been some, because the ECI workers are a reflection of workers in general who, in turn, reflect some of the dominant views that exist in society. But it should also be noted that the BNP and UKIP were turned away from picket lines, and Meardi (2012) noted that the left-inclined Italian media’s coverage of the strike as xenophobic, some of which was used by the left in Britain that opposed the strikes, was very much mistaken. In the subsequent strikes, grassroots on-site and inter-site organisation existed so that such vacuums did not occur, and with more national union involvement, official national union flags (particularly those of Unite) grew in presence and abundance.

Discussion and conclusion

The display of worker militancy and vibrant, independent-minded workplace union organisation embodied in the ECI strikes of 2009 is evocative of a past age of the 1960s and 1970s, as portrayed in studies by Beynon (1984) and Lane (1974). ¹⁵ To this extent, the strikes and the sympathy action stand out as being almost unique in the present period. ¹⁶ In attempting to explain their existence, and recalling the aforementioned nature of the ECI (especially its anti-cyclical nature, and fragility regarding financial penalties), four phenomena warrant consideration. These are worker consciousness, strike leverage, internal union dynamics, and the industry-specific regime of accumulation. Collectively, they attest to the utility of the mobilisation theory of Kelly (1998) to explain the resistance and oppositionalism embodied in the strikes. Indeed, the case of the ECI workers provides a particularly illuminating example of this utility not so much because it adds some empirical ‘flesh’ to the theoretical ‘bones’ Kelly traced out, but because it shows the presence of a particular set of components and their attendant configuration which are specific to the ECI. This, in turn, suggests that a combination of general principles – that is, mobilisation theory – and careful, specific application of these is needed to understand what remains as minority phenomenon within a denuded and atrophied contemporary union movement. It would thus be wrong to conclude, as many on the far left in Britain did (see, for example, Kimber, 2009), that if one group of workers can engage in militant struggle then another group of workers can do likewise, because in seeking to generalise from one example, specificity is willingly ignored.

In line with this degree of sensitivity to the specific, and before proceeding to discuss the four phenomena, it is worth noting that construction workers in other countries with quite widely different regimes of social and legal regulation do not display broadly similar union traditions to their counter-parts in Britain. For example, in Finland, their workplace unionism has traditionally allowed construction workers, in concert with their national union, to exercise significant control over the supply of labour, particularly through the use of boycotts of supplying labour (Lillie and Greer, 2007). By contrast, in Germany, the construction workers’ union has not had the same workplace prowess and has used political action predominantly to protect its members’ interests (Lillie and Greer, 2007). Meanwhile, in the USA, the industry has become both increasingly deregulated and de-unionised (Belman and Smith, 2009; Weil, 2005) in a manner far in advance of many other economies, despite earlier union action traditions which mirror those found in Britain and Finland.

Although the ECI is organised on the basis of itinerant, temporary work which suggests dislocation and disorganisation, there is strong evidence – not least by dint of the sympathy actions and activists’ networks – that an industry identity-cum-consciousness exists amongst a considerable proportion of the workforce. The sense of industry identity concerns not specific trades or skills, but the more general ‘occupation’ of being skilled or semi-skilled workers in the ECI, which gives relational or associational meaning to the workers concerned through a common identity and associated common interests at both individual and collective levels. The formation of this sense of community, both ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, is part and parcel of the consciousness which comprises a heightened sense of ‘them and us’, whereby ECI workers are defined by who they are as well as who they are not. The prevalence in this industry of identity and close social intra-workforce relations, as described above, when coupled in a mutually reinforcing way with a high level of antagonism and often open conflict between capital and labour at the site level, have prompted the development of industry occupational consciousness, akin to both Beynon’s (1984) ‘factory class consciousness’ and Lane’s (1974) ‘factory consciousness’. So at the industry occupational level within the ECI, there is a high level of comprehension amongst workers of the nature and manifestations of class relations within the industry in which they work. Concomitantly, and not unexpectedly, this awareness does not then extend in such an acute manner to class relations outside the industry in which they work, and to class relations per se. In these regards, there is a similarity with the skilled manual workforce in the offshore oil and gas industry in Britain (see Mackie, 2004), amongst rail workers (especially train drivers – see Darlington, 2009; Strangleman, 2004), and in shipbuilding (McBride, 2004, 2006, 2011), where implicit notions of community and occupation are more persuasive and collective social bonding more pervasive.

Two aspects further highlight the pervasiveness of this industry identity and consciousness. The first has been the involvement of many unemployed ECI workers in the protests, indicating that the gap between being unemployed and working is not a large one given the temporal nature of the projects and employment in the industry, and an industry-wide solidarity levy to fund transport to demonstrations against wage undercutting for those otherwise unable to attend. The second, by contrast, is that some thirty or more years ago, the ECI workforce was heavily characterised by a high degree of sectionalism and intra-workforce antipathy which was best exemplified by the long-running 1980 Isle of Grain laggers’ strike. Even though managerial tactics of ‘divide and rule’ were often at the centre of such disputes and friction, many of the ECI workers then did not see it so, and nor thus, management and employers as their common opponent.

The ECI strikers exerted a significant degree of leverage over the employers, although at some financial cost to themselves. Yet at no time was the continuity of production, generation or distribution threatened, for the strikes never spilled over through picketing out and/or solidarity walkouts to other strategically placed fellow unionised workers (see above). The intriguingly favourable outcome (despite lack of spill over) resulted from the nature of the contractual regimes between power generators and their contractors over the capital build projects. The contracts specify completion deadlines and stipulate fines for contractors that miss deadlines. The consequence of this is to put pressure upon contractors to resolve strikes which threaten their contractual deadlines. The same is true for contractors that employ sub-contractors, for they may feel compelled to intervene in the latter’s industrial relations if strikes threaten the meeting of contractual deadlines. However, there also exists some pressure on power generators to intervene in their contractors’ industrial relations if strikes threaten to delay the beginning of energy generation. So the source of the power of the ECI workforce is quite different from that of postal workers or train drivers, which is primarily characterised by the effect of the withdrawal of essential labour so that strike action has an immediate impact on a service that is not readily substitutable by alternative means (Gall, 2003: Darlington, 2009). However, it is still the case that gaining acceptable agreements with employers is not synonymous with the implementation of these agreements, for pressure remains upon employers to increase profits through labour-cost reductions, and these decisions to do so are made in different arenas from those in which agreements are made with the unions. Consequently, follow-up disputes and strikes, which attempt to prevent reneging on agreements and to secure their implementation, are not uncommon.

The primary agency of momentum and action in the ECI strikes was a combination of steward and grassroots activism, both in terms of the national unions’ campaign on the issues of posted workers and wage undercutting, and the strike themselves. As discussed above, there were some tensions and compatibilities between different levels within the two unions. However, whether for reasons of the unions as organisations being responsive to their members or maintaining control of their membership and the union-employer relationship, the two national unions played a large role in the settlement of the strikes. It is a peculiar quirk of collective labour law in Britain that having repudiated the unballoted actions for fear of opening themselves up to legal action and financial penalties, the two national unions – represented by their national EUOs – were the negotiators for strikers. This is because said labour law is largely immaterial to the resolution of the disputes, for this is a matter of collective bargaining (whether in official or unofficial fora). The tensions that did exist within the unions during the disputes arose primarily between the relatively small groups of initial strikers and their national unions over the means for arriving at settlements and their terms. The sympathy strikers were cast in the role here of onlookers to this intra-union tension. But the overall point is not that the strikes can convincingly be portrayed as ‘rank-and-file’ strike organised in the teeth of opposition of a (conservative) union bureaucracy.

In order to further understand the configuration of the four-fold phenomena in the ECI, comparison with other construction workers in Britain, such as those in house-building and small non-residential projects, is also useful. Their employment status is primarily a mixture of sub-contracted employed, agency and self-employed (Forde et al., 2009), and the business cycle under which they work is far more akin to the general business cycle. This generates relatively greater employment insecurity. The size of the on-site workforces is smaller (as is that of many of the employing organisations), and building projects are generally of shorter duration. Although their worksites and working patterns can be equally episodic, temporary and itinerant, they do not tend to work away from home and in the same social settings. Moreover, some of their skills are less specific and relatively more general, such as bricklaying, plumbing, painting and carpentry. Where collective bargaining does exist, it takes the form of industry agreements but for different trades, inhibiting the development of cross-trade consciousness. All these factors help explain the low and declining collective bargaining coverage and union density. By employees, the former has fallen from 22 per cent in 1998 to 17.7 per cent in 2010, and the latter from 21 per cent in 1998 to 14.5 per cent in 2010 (Achur, 2011). Moreover, because of the inclusion of the ECI, bargaining and density levels for construction workers outside the ECI will be far lower. Finally, the union for construction workers outside the ECI is primarily UCATT, which has experienced a far greater denudation of its workplace influence and presence than have the GMB and Unite in the ECI. On this basis, it and its members are far less able to organise strikes and other forms of collective action outside its heartland of the local authorities and their direct labour organisations.

The four phenomena of worker consciousness, strike leverage, internal union dynamics and the industry specific regime of accumulation can then be seen to provide the mutually reinforcing terms for the existence and maintenance of both national multi-employer sector bargaining and local worksite bargaining. Without the continuation of the twin forms of bargaining, and the labour unionism that underlies them, it would be difficult to comprehend how such militant and solidaristic action could have occurred. Yet these militant and solidaristic actions were not omnipotent in the prosecuting the defence of the ECI workers’ interests. Notwithstanding their role in creating the 2010-2011 NAECI, a key limitation to the strikes was that they were fire-fighting the symptoms rather than attacking the cause of the undercutting in regard of the PWR. Setting aside the client–contractor relations and subcontracting, the strikers built a case for the revisiting and revising of the extremely neoliberal 1999 interpretation of the PWR into national regulations. The PWR stipulate that terms and conditions should not be below the legal minimum as per the minimum wage and the like, rather than that they should not be below the collectively bargained industry rates. (This was why the unions argued that sub-contractors had not broken the law and that, rather, the law was wrong). There is an inherent difficulty in gaining such revision in terms of the complex relationship between the issues of free movement of services and labour; non-discrimination and equal treatment; and the right of association and industrial action (Dølvik and Visser 2009), where the rights of capital transcend those of labour and where European Union institutions and policies are several steps removed from the dynamics of national politics. That said, the strikers and their unions were unable to construct the necessary social pressure and alliances to enforce such a demand on the then ‘new’ Labour government, so that the attempt to gain revision was not even begun. This meant that the drive for profits still takes the form of lawful wage undercutting – as was shown by a union-instigated audit carried out by an independent body revealing that non-domiciled workers were still being paid less than national agreement rates at one site in 2010 (GMB, 2010). So while undoubtedly militant in contemporary terms, the strikes were rather more moderate in achieving the strikers’ desired outcomes.

A one-day unofficial strike by 440 Redhall workers at the site of the construction of a bio-ethanol plant at Saltend near Hull in early 2011 indicated that in different circumstances, the widespread solidaristic traditions of the 2009 strikes were not necessarily hegemonic. The strike against the main contractor was over the process by which redundancies were to be instituted, with the strikers believing that this was contrary to the NAECI. According to it, length of service on the contract and not with the employer is the principle by which redundancy selection and compensation takes place. This strike was supported by electricians and scaffolders who refused to cross the Redhall workers’ picket line. Less than a week later, the client (Vivergo) terminated the contract of the main contractor, Redhall, precipitating the redundancy of all the workers and leading to an official dispute with protests and picketing that lasted three months before the workers accepted a pay off (which first was not offered and then was improved several times along with various ‘strings’ being dropped). Despite the involvement of a number of the key activists from the 2009 strikes, who had moved with the available work to Saltend, there were only two or three short sympathy walkouts from nearby ECI workers, and national meetings of the shop stewards from construction sites did not call for national solidarity action as had happened in 2009 (despite initially agreeing to a ‘day of action’ for the Redhall workers). Neither were the Saltend sacked workers able to use flying pickets to gain widespread sympathy actions, as had occurred in 2009 with the Lindsey strikers.

The key reason for the difference in the forms of action was to be found in the absence of the perception of the provocative spark of work being denied to already domiciled workers and given to non-domiciled, cheaper, non-union workers in an attempt to undermine the NAECI. (This also meant that the dispute was relatively unknown in the ECI, because it received very little media attention). In other words, the redundancies seemed of the more routine ‘normal’ type, which, while seen as unfair and unfortunate (given the convention of the NAECI to allow workers to follow the work to the next contractor), did not excite quite the same passions. This was even though the situation of the ending of the Redhall contract was unusual. Vivergo claimed that not all the work had been completed and was running behind time. In these circumstances, a new contractor is usually appointed to complete the outstanding work. However, this did not happen, with the effect that the Redhall workers were not transferred to the new contractor as would normally have happened. Amongst some, there have been suspicions that the dispute was about – or would have the effect of – undermining the NAECI. Nonetheless, the kind of action seen in 2009 was not forthcoming. What may also explain this are two factors. First, the central internal union dynamic of the Saltend dispute was different compared to Lindsey et al. It did not begin with unofficial strike action as was the case in 2009, and the dispute (as a ‘lockout’) was made official by the two unions (GMB, Unite) fairly early on, so that union officials rather than grassroots activists were in the driving seat of the prosecution of the dispute. This led to the ability of the Unite union officials to heavily promote the ‘cash for jobs’ deal. Second, ECI workers appeared more fearful than they were in 2009 to take sympathy strike action for fear of losing their jobs and livelihoods. This brief comparison with the 2009 strikes serves all the more to emphasise the need for nuanced analysis of such mobilisations as particular moments in space and time.