Energy workers: No to the nationalist strikes!

Around 3,000 construction workers at oil refineries around the country are taking wildcat, unofficial strike action. Another 900 workers at Sellafield nuclear power plant may join them on Monday 2 February.

Normally Workers Power would energetically support strike action by workers - including unofficial strikes taken without the formal support of the union leaders.

But this strike is different. We unreservedly oppose it.

Why? Because the strikers' target is not their employers but 100 Italian and Portuguese workers at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire.

British Jobs for British Workers?
The strike wave of construction workers in energy and oil refineries started on Wednesday 28 January. Eight hundred Unite members at Lindsey oil refinery in North Killingholme, Lincolnshire walked out in protest at the employment of 100 Italian and Portuguese workers, with the prospect of at least 200 more joining them, for the construction of a desulphurisation unit. The workers are being housed in makeshift accommodation aboard a ship moored at Grimsby docks.

No British worker has yet been sacked. The employers claim these are new jobs. But they were not advertised locally at a time when hundreds of construction workers with the relevant skills were unemployed because of the slump in the building trade. The migrant workers were employed under the rules of the European Union posted workers' directive, which allows a company - in this case, Italian based IREM - in any EU state to use its own employees on temporary projects within the EU.

As we go to press, there are unconfirmed media reports that IREM says the foreign workers' wages are in line with those of UK workers and that they had negotiated a deal with Unite. It is claimed that Bernard McAuley, regional officer of Unite, attended three meetings in January and secured a deal that the Italians would get the same pay as the British engineers, electricians and pipe-fitters on the site. A Unite spokesman confirmed to the press: "Bernard did negotiate to get a properly agreed deal for the Italian workers."

Shop steward Garry Scales told the BBC: "We are angry that workers have been taken on from outside the UK when people here are out of work." Another shop steward, Kenny Ward, was even more explicit: "There are thousands in this country that are victims to this discrimination, this victimisation of the British worker", and Bernard McAuley said at a rally at Lindsey: "There is sufficient unemployed, skilled labour wanting the right to work on that site and they are demanding the right to work on that site."

Of course workers are quite right to be angry about mounting unemployment. The unions should have been giving a militant lead over the last year, when unemployment began to rise. They should be calling marches and strikes for the right to work - for jobs for every unemployed worker. Instead union leaders have accepted lay-offs and closures, with fatalistic sighs of regret.

What is wrong is to take the small number of jobs on offer on this project (300) as the grounds for a fight with fellow workers on nationalist lines. To present the whole issue as one of a conflict with immigrants is to direct the struggle in an utterly reactionary direction.

Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite, is quoted on the union's website: "The union is doing everything in its power to ensure that employers end this immoral, potentially illegal and politically dangerous practice of excluding UK workers from some construction projects."

This may be more cautious (hypocritical) than the homemade placards of some of the protesters, but its only possible meaning is the same: British labour should have first refusal of any job and to hell with the rights of migrant labour. Simpson's only real difference is that he wants to shield the Labour government from the anger of workers - and if that means indirectly deflecting it towards "foreign" workers, then so be it.

The TUC and the big unions should not be expressing sympathy with nationalist slogans but getting off their backsides and launching a militant campaign to defend every job. They could start by calling a nationwide general strike and mass demonstration like the French unions did on Thursday 28 January. A few simple clear slogans should be raised:
• Not a single job must go.
• Jobs for all the unemployed.
• No pay cuts.
• No to subcontracting and outsourcing.
• No to racism and nationalist divisions - for workers' unity.
• The bosses and the bankers should pay for the crisis - not the workers.

Left cover for nationalism
Some on the left, to their shame, support the action under the guise of the right to work.

The Communist Party of Britain's Morning Star blamed it all on the "the bosses' freedom to exploit as enshrined in EU law" (as if British law outlaws this), which, it claimed in shocking nationalist language "has effectively deprived British workers of the right to seek employment in their own country" (editorial 30 January).

This is a shameless whipping up of nationalism. There are two million unemployed in Britain. No more than a few thousand jobs are taken up under this particular EU directive. It is overwhelmingly British bosses who are destroying livelihoods and wrecking communities, but they are being let off the hook by the CPB, who want a national solution, rather than a class solution.

What would the CPB say if German Communists launched a campaign against British workers working on contracts in Germany? This policy is the bitter fruit of their long-term anti-EU mania, the belief that they can unite with progressive British bosses to build up industry and jobs on this little island. For these false communists "Workers of the world unite" has been dropped for "Workers and patriotic bosses of the UK unite!"

George Galloway, Respect MP, has denounced "attempts to confuse and mis-report, the fundamental issue that's led thousands of construction workers to defy the anti-union laws and walk off the job." Their objectives, he claims, is simply "decent jobs, open for all to apply for." (Respect Renewal website). Of course the underlying motives of the workers are indeed a concern for jobs and a fear of mass unemployment, but the target they have chosen and the slogan they have adopted are disastrously wrong ones.

Left avoids standing firm
Galloway is backed up by his fellow Respect member and challenger in the forthcoming general secretary election in Unite, Jerry Hicks, who also supports the strikes, whitewashing their nationalism. He says: "The employers have deliberately and actively been looking for ways to exploit cheap labour," and links the Lindsey strike to widespread union-busting and blacklisting of activists at construction sites in the energy sector - see Socialist Unity website.

Yet no one can show that anyone has been replaced by cheaper labour, that any union agreement has been broken, or that derecognition of a union has taken place. That being the case - and given the overwhelming calls for British jobs for British workers - it is clear that Hicks is simply trying to avoid having to stand firm against the reactionary movement.

Hicks has been involved in the wider, shop steward led campaign against sub-contractors since last November. He claims this has been instrumental to the strike's spreading to the Shell gas plant and Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland, AES Kilroot power station in Northern Ireland, Aberthaw power station and Milford Haven gas terminal in Wales, and the Marchwood plant on the south coast. Of course a campaign against employing non-union contract labour at levels below those agreed with the unions has to be fought,

But surely, if these are the issues and not the nationalist right of British workers to seek work in "their own" country, as the Morning Star so foully puts it, then Hicks could have chosen a much clearer target than the employment of an isolated group of European workers. Instead, the "little Englanders and downright racists" that Galloway correctly warns against are given an open field to champion the movement.

Despite their militancy, their rank and file organisation and their real grievances, the workers who have taken up this strike and the shop stewards who have worked to organise the wildcat action have chosen the wrong slogans and the wrong objective. It is plain from the placards and the interviews that the workers on the picket lines believe "foreign" workers are taking their jobs, and that the solution to this is for these and all future jobs to be transferred to British workers thrown on the dole in the recession.

As the recession begins to bite, workers may be deflected from fighting the real enemy - the capitalist class and its loyal Labour government - and instead turn on the millions of migrant workers in the UK. That is certainly what The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Express want them to do. But these workers are not the cause of mass unemployment. The bosses, who were happy to make millions in profit from whatever source of labour it could during the upturn, are now cutting and running.

There is no evidence that we are aware of that the workers involved are active racists, let alone influenced by the fascist British Nationalist Party. Nevertheless, it is no surprise that the BNP has been quick to try and capitalise on the confusion caused by the lack of clear leadership.

It is tragic that the first sign of a militant fightback against the effects of the recession has been misdirected. To those who would like to attribute this to some inherent "backwardness" of the workers, we say: no, it is due to the appalling leadership that the British workers' movement is saddled with. We should not forget who imported into the labour movement the BNP-coined slogan "British jobs for British workers". It was Gordon Brown at the 2007 Labour Party Conference.

To this must be added the support for such nonsense by the likes of Unite's Simpson and the TUC's Brendan Barber. Eager supporters too are the union-jack waving CPB. And bringing up the rear - a little shamefaced it is true, but full of excuses and cover-ups for the strikes and their slogans - are Respect and the Socialist Party. Their self-appointed task is to shield the strikes from internationalist criticism.

The Socialist Party, in a weasely-worded statement on its website, says: "The main issue is not that "foreign" workers are being brought in by the employers, as reported in the media, but that there are thousands of unemployed construction workers." It adds that it has one of its members on the six-person strike committee.

They say they are "raising the demand that any worker should be part of the national engineering construction agreements that cover the wages and conditions on the sites".

In fact any socialist on such a committee would call for the committee to renounce the call for British jobs for British workers and - if this were not carried in a mass meeting - would oppose the action and speak for its immediate end, while opposing any attempt by the bosses to use the opportunity to smash the union.

As Leon Trotsky explained in 1939: "A trade union led by reactionary fakers organises a strike against the admission of Negro workers into a certain branch of industry. Shall we support such a shameful strike? Of course not. But let us imagine that the bosses, utilising the given strike, make an attempt to crush the trade union and to make impossible in general the organised self-defence of the workers. In this case we will defend the trade union as a matter of course in spite of its reactionary leadership."

The Socialist Workers Party, to its great credit, has taken a principled line. But whatever different groupings' attitudes to these strikes, it is the failure of the reformist and centrist Left to create a new mass party of the working class over the last decade of Labour rule that has left these workers without a clear anticapitalist programme of action and open to the poison of nationalism.

Politics and internationalism
It is not surprising that workers' first serious rebellion in this new period of conflict should display the terrible political legacy of the previous period. Nor is it fatal, as long as it is fought. But it is a sharp lesson, a major wake up call to the left.

We need to actively promote internationalism: British workers have a hundred times more in common with Italian and Portuguese workers, with Polish and African workers, than they do with any of their bosses. We need to give this organised expression too by building links for common struggle across national borders.

We need international rank and file trade unions, free from any bureaucratic stranglehold; we need common actions across Europe, like those planned during the meeting of the G20.

We need a new working class party. The time for delay is well and truly over - the absence of a new mass working class party is no longer just a missed opportunity but is now a terrible danger.

The whole left should throw off its caution and bruised feelings following the failed initiatives of recent years and convene a conference for a new party as soon as possible. This has to be part of a process of bringing the British class struggle closer together with the struggles of workers in Europe and beyond. In splendid isolation, all the reactionary vapours of British national ideology will be far hard to fight. But hand-in-hand with the great struggles of the more class conscious French, Italian and Spanish workers, a new internationalist and anticapitalist workers' resistance can take shape here too.

This can and must be part of the fight for a new International - a world working class party able to provide revolutionary anticapitalist political leadership in these times of great crisis.