Scottish Refinery Workers Strike over Pensions

Workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland walked off the job yesterday as part of a two-day work stoppage to protest threatened pension cuts. Ineos, the company that bought the refinery operation from BP in 2005, says it will take up to 3 weeks to get the refinery back to full capacity. The pipeline from the Forties North Sea oil fields is also closed due to the strike. Petrol, as gas is known there, may run close to £1.50 a liter before the summer ends.

The Ineos party line, as stated by the general manager of the Grangemouth operation Gordon Grant, is “This pension was inherited from BP. BP are an upstream oil company. We are a petrochemical company and we have to have a pension that is competitive in the market place that we operate in. Petrochemicals is a difficult market place and we have to be competitive in everything that we do.”

What Mr. Grant said makes Ineos sound like a struggling little Mom and Pop operation. This is, of course, twaddle. Jim Radcliffe, who owns Ineos, is a billionaire. He revived the UK’s petrochemicals industry after years of it being under-managed, and he spent £15 billion putting it together. Ineos now has sales of £25 billion a year. The point is Ineos isn’t as big as BP, but it can afford these pensions.

The Unite union represents the factory workers, (there are 1,200) and its national officer Phil McNulty said, “We believe that Ineos has acted cynically in its dealings with us and we are suspicious about its intentions even to try to avert a strike. Our members have acted in good faith throughout this dispute. We have talked to Ineos for eight months and only when the company breached the terms of the consultation by introducing changes to the pension scheme without agreement did we ballot out members."

The man who is in the hot seat, though, is Prime Minister Gordon Brown. William Rees-Mogg of The Times stated, “His first action as Chancellor, as long ago as 1997, was to take some £5 billion a year of tax from the pension funds. That stealth tax led to the old final-salary system being widely discarded as too expensive. Mr Brown caused the British pensions crisis that lies behind the Grangemouth dispute. He is more to blame than Unite or Ineos.”

With his popularity falling and petrol prices soaring, this might be the most politically important labor dispute since Arthur Scargill led the coal miners out on strike in 1984, and this time, the government might not win.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Kensington Review Home