The elephant in the room is hard at work today – being invisible. From the
BBC website and
elsewhere, we learn that
around 800 people took part in the demonstration outside the giant Lindsey Oil Refinery at North Killingholme, Lincs
yesterday.Jobs for the (foreign) boys!
The elephant in the room is hard at work today – being invisible. From the
BBC website and
elsewhere, we learn that
around 800 people took part in the demonstration outside the giant Lindsey Oil Refinery at North Killingholme, Lincs
yesterday.
The workers walked out in protest to 250 jobs being given to foreign workers instead of unemployed locals following the awarding of a specialist contract to an Italian firm.
They have been supported by Derek Simpson, joint leader of Unite, who has called for urgent meetings with the Government and employers to discuss the "exclusion" of UK workers from some of Britain's major engineering and construction projects. "We have a growing problem in the engineering and construction industry," he says, "where UK workers are being excluded from important projects."
However, there is nothing at all that the government can do. Readers may dimly recall in 2007, two separate actions in the ECJ, one concerning the Rosella ferry and the other, about Laval un Partneri.
In the first case, a Finnish ferry company, Viking, had replaced the crew on one of its ships with Estonian
workers, in order to cut costs. In the second, a Latvian construction firm Laval un Partneri Ltd had won a contract
to refurbish a school at Vaxholm, Sweden, but the company sought to use cheaper Latvian workers rather than
indigenous Swedish workers (or Latvians at Swedish rates).
In both cases, the court upheld the employers' rights to employ cheaper, foreign workers. Also, in both cases, the
court upheld the right of displaced workers (or those under threat of displacement) to take "collective action",
although it also ruled that any such action would be illegal if it restricted the EU's rules on freedom of
establishment.
As it stands, it looks like the Humberside workers are on a loser. Their strike cannot be allowed to succeed, otherwise it would be illegal under EU law and, in any case, the refinery and the contractors are entirely within their rights, again under EU law, to hire foreign workers.