SALTEND DISPUTE UPDATE

30 May The heroic struggle by engineering construction workers locked out from work on the bio-ethanol plant at BP Saltend near Hull has ended after nearly three months.

The fight by 400 workers to win back their jobs, after their contractor Redhalls was thrown off the job by Vivergo the BP owned client, has not been successful. The decision of the NECC national shop stewards forum, under pressure from the trade union bureaucracy, to not call industry-wide industrial action was a crucial turning-point in this dispute.

However, the refusal of the workers to accept a financial settlement with onerous conditions and continued protests by a hard-core of protesters have forced Vivergo, who initially refused any responsibility for the locked-out workers, to increase the money and drop most of the strings.

Whilst most workers have now understandably taken the money, a few, including Lock-Out Committee member Keith Gibson has refused to take any pay-off from Redhalls or Vivergo and will pursue legal claims against these companies.

These will be important test cases because the worry is that what BP/Vivergo have done at Saltend will set a dangerous precedent of mass sackings by employers in the industry as a means of breaking the national NAECI agreement and undermining TUPE rights.