The negotiations between Unite and GMB on the one side and the employers on the other at ACAS have reached a deal, which has now been accepted by the Lindsey workers.

This proposed deal follows the rejection by the strikers yesterday of a proposal that would have seen around 25% of the 195 jobs in dispute going to British workers.

Workers voted this morning to accept the deal, which will see British workers given 102 of the 195 construction jobs on the contract. According to the unions, approval was unanimous.

Bernard McAuley, Unite’s chief negotiator, told the Guardian: "We've made sure that no Italians have been made redundant, we've got jobs for 102 British people and we've also made sure that Fabio Capello stays as England manager.”

While no Italian or Portuguese workers have been made redundant, the jobs are reallocated from those that would have gone to contracted IREM workers. Only around 100 of the projected 300 were already working at the refinery. The strikers won just over half of the jobs that were going to be taken by the IREM workforce when they arrived.

The small pie – less than 200 jobs for nine weeks – has been cut up on the basis of workers’ nationality: the strikers have won 102 British jobs for British workers.

That the 100 IREM workers already at Lindsey have not lost their jobs is good. Now they have to work in an atmosphere not exactly conducive to international solidarity.

And the BBC adds that Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite, told BBC Breakfast that besides this dispute there was a "wider problem" to address.

"Even if this dispute is settled [there is] still a major problem about how these foreign companies, who win contracts and come complete with a workforce, are going to create other difficulties.

"We need to build in some sort of concept that the jobs that are created by these contracts are open to everyone - to foreign and to UK workers.

"It will occur again, and I'm sure it will occur in other countries as well unless there's a realisation that you can't just use the freedom of labour to the exclusion of indigenous labour."

This strike has established an enormously dangers precedent for unofficial quotas for foreign and British labour on construction sites. Even the Socialist Party (SP) leaflet called for this when it said: “This worker solidarity is against the ‘conscious blacking’ of British construction workers by company bosses who refuse to recruit skilled British labour in the U.K.” (This formulation, found on the socialistunity blog, seem to have been removed from the version of the SP leaflet on their website).

There are rumours on the blogs too that many of the strikers regard the latest Acas proposal as a 'sell out' - they want more than 50 percent of the jobs to be British, or they want IREM the Italian contractor to be sent packing. And still more serious, workers at the Staythorpe Power Station who have taken solidarity action want the 600 new jobs there to be for British workers - what will they do?

Even if the deal had involved only new jobs being created without any foreign worker losing their job it will only have secured this progressive result by negotiators riding a wave of chauvinism that sets back class consciousness hugely and which sets a really dangerous precedent. The strike has sparked a wave of strikes targeting foreign workers' jobs and potential jobs and has brought a vile nationalist demand and attitude to the fore in the working class movement.

Workers Power stands 100% behind our consistent opposition to these strikes.

1. The spontaneous walkouts were motivated not just by an underlying need for jobs and fear of the recession but by a chauvinist demand for ‘British jobs for British workers’ (Bj4Bw).
2. The Socialist Party denied that that was the motive and tried to cover it up.
3. The demands the SP advanced to the strike committee did not repudiate the Bj4Bw demand.
4. The wave of solidarity strikes were not and is not progressive but around the demand for Bj4Bw.
5. The Unite demand for 'local jobs' is just a watered down expression of Bj4Bw.
6. Far from being a ‘strike against sub-contracting’ this was the premise of the whole dispute. Now Derek Simpson and co are arguing openly that foreign firms with workers on permanent contracts must be forced to use sub-contracted British labour.
7. A dangerous precedent has been set that all new jobs have to have a guaranteed 'British' component, setting the scene for persistent wrangling over how many jobs go to British rather than overseas citizens.
8. The claim by Unite officials that they insisted that no foreign workers jobs be lost, if true, reflects the fact that internationalists - in terms of influence in the movement, essentially the SWP - succeeded in stigmatising the BJ4BW demand. Neither were the British ruling class at all happy with its protectionist implications. No doubt the union bureaucracy was also influenced by the fact that there are many UK workers working abroad (including Italy as has been highly publicised) and they got huge amounts of stick from the TU bureaucracy of the EU countries, which drove the compromise they have won. This all forced those who had accommodated to it initially to cover their backsides; it is also of course likely that IREM and Total did not want to replace their existing labour force entirely with British labour and therefore were not willing to accede to this demand in negotiations.
9. There is little reason to believe this scenario can be repeated in the next “British jobs for British workers” strike.
10. In this context the ‘British jobs for British workers’ movement has not led to foreign workers being made redundant but in other contexts it will. In the wider social context it is a political message driven home into sections of the working class that will see a rise not only of chauvinism but outright racism too.

If we put BjfBw first instead of unite and strike, instead of working class action, it would mean civil war, the working class tearing itself apart while the bosses rode through the middle. A disaster.

The whole dispute shows not only the chauvinism deeply embedded in the union bureaucracy, Labourism (Brown and his ministers) and Stalinism (Morning Star) in Britain but also the hopelessness of “pure trade unionism” faced with a major capitalist crisis. A week of “trade union approved” chauvinism only adds and encourages the Daily Mail and the other right wing tabloids long campaign. The Mail has recently said that official figures “show that just 63 percent of the 3,315 workers on the Olympic Park are British and eight per cent are Irish. The remaining 29 percent are foreign workers, half of whom hail from non-EU countries.”

Those who say we and other internationalists have isolated ourselves by our stance have no faith in the working class. The dispute has opened a huge debate in the movement in which we can and will press the case for internationalism. And this is just one dispute, a skirmish at the onset of a huge series of battles, in which the internationalists can go forward with untarnished principles and programme, without having allowed opportunist ideas of accommodating to nationalism to become part of our method, and unencumbered by the need to explain away an unpardonable opportunist crime.

While all this has been going on thousands of car workers and steel workers are laid off or sacked and all the union leaders can say is how tragic it is. They don't even think to organise action to defend these jobs. A dangerous and chauvinist campaign for British workers alone will do nothing to stop these job losses. We need to fight all job losses and closures by occupations, and by fighting for a massive programme of public works to stop the scandal of unemployment.

There is no doubt that this episode has been a real test for the left - one that Workers Power, the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Fight and even the International Socialist Group in one way or another have passed while others like Respect, SP, AWL and Permanent Revolution have failed. We can hold our heads high and press forward, rallying internationalist workers and youth to us in the period ahead.

The following should be read alongside this article
Those who play with fire will get burnt
Energy workers: no to the nationalist strikes