Vol. 73/No. 6      February 16, 2009

The strikes began January 28 when about 600 skilled contract construction workers, members of the union Unite, walked out at the Lindsey oil refinery, owned by the French company Total in Lincolnshire in the north of England. This was after a U.S.-owned contractor subcontracted work to an Italian firm that decided to employ Italian and Portuguese workers on the job. They are allowed to do so under European Union law.

According to the Times newspaper, some 40 demonstrators sought out the ship housing the Italian workers and staged a protest there demanding that they “go back to their own country.”

The work stoppage at Lindsey was followed by actions on at least 20 construction sites at energy facilities in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Capitalist newspapers have had varying reactions. The Times, expressing the capitalists’ need for “the free movement of labour,” said “erecting barriers to imports and to labour is a tempting route and a disastrous one.” The right-wing Daily Express, on the other hand, covered the actions sympathetically.

Top union leaders have backed the actions, which they do not normally do with illegal strikes. The Daily Telegraph reported that government ministers were “informally discussing the situation” with union leaders.

Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, expressed support for the actions and Derek Simpson, joint general secretary of Unite, said, “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.”

Kathleen Walker Shaw of the GMB union said the issue was “social dumping across Europe.”

According to the Sunday Times the unions involved are planning a protest in London which the paper dubbed “a national march against foreign workers.”

Prime Minister Brown and Business Secretary Peter Mandelson have both attacked the strikes. Meanwhile Peter Hain, a former Labour government minister, said that the actions showed something had gone “badly wrong” with British employment laws. “After all, the first duty of a British government is to protect its own voters, its own citizens and its own workers,” Hain said.

The ultraright British National Party (BNP) is promoting the strikes, featuring coverage prominently on its Web site. BNP leader Nicholas Griffin, in a statement entitled “Solidarity with the construction lads,” called for “Sympathy Strikes Now!”

A statement by the UK Socialist Workers Party, a petty-bourgeois leftwing party, said, “these strikes are based around the wrong slogans and target the wrong people.”

The Morning Star, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Britain, defended the actions. On February 3 under a front-page headline reading “Strikers defy arctic storm: walkouts over foreign jobs spread to power stations,” the paper glowingly referred to the actions as “unofficial strikes against EU-sanctioned ‘social dumping.’” It also reported that “the Communist Party of Britain urged support for the workers ‘rising up against the whole rotten set-up.’”

Communist League leader Jonathan Silberman, speaking at a public meeting in London January 31, said, “Communist workers oppose these reactionary strikes. Clarity on these actions is decisive. They are aimed at workers from overseas and are against the interests of all working people. Such nationalism is a deadly trap, the more so at a time of capitalist crisis and spreading wars.

“Mass immigration into the United Kingdom and other imperialist countries has strengthened the working class,” Silberman said. “Forging unity with our brothers and sisters from other countries is a life-and-death question for the labor movement as the bosses’ attacks deepen.”
 
 
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