Wildcat strikes over the use of foreign labour on UK construction projects continued today as more talks were held on settling the bitter dispute.
At a mass gathering outside Total's Lindsey oil refinery in Lincolnshire, strike leaders addressed around 400 protesters ahead of a meeting with Acas, the conciliation service, over the row about safeguarding British jobs.
Unions said around 400 contractors at Scottish Power's Longannet power station in Fife and about 130 at its Cockenzie power station in East Lothian had agreed to continue their unofficial strike action until Friday after meetings this morning.
The 700 contractors at the Grangemouth oil refinery in central Scotland who walked out on Friday and yesterday returned to work today. About 80 workers at ExxonMobil's petrochemicals plant in Mossmorran, Fife, walked out again today but will hold another meeting tomorrow.
The wildcat action began last week after the Italian company IREM won a £200m construction contract at Lindsey and supplied its own permanent workforce of mostly Italians and Portuguese workers. British workers at more than a dozen facilities took part in wildcat strikes at the end of last week. Yesterday, the numbers grew as thousands more British workers walked out at the Sellafield and Heysham nuclear plants and other sites in Warrington, Staythorpe, Selby, Milford Haven and Aberthaw.
At the Lindsey refinery, Keith Gibson, of the GMB union, told strikers: "This issue is based around the defence of the construction industry national agreement which, we believe, with their use of foreign labour or otherwise, is a direct attack on a national agreement. They won't be happy until they've broken that agreement, until they've lowered the wages and living standards of construction workers in this industry."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/03/wildcat-strikes-foreign-labour-talks
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