Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

Strikes in oil refineries and power stations

The class struggle is for all workers! | 10.02.2009 01:01 | Globalisation | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements | Liverpool | World

The walk-outs and demonstrations by workers in oil refineries and power stations over the question of unemployment show the depth of anger in the working class faced with the tidal wave of redundancies brought about by the economic crisis. This wave of lay-offs and short-time working is not confined to Britain but is engulfing the globe. From the USA to China, from western Europe to Russia, no workers' job is safe; and even when they have work, wages are being cut and working conditions worsened.


But workers around the world are showing their unwillingness to accept these attacks: there are daily strikes and demonstrations in China; at the end of January 2.5 million workers in France struck in protest about unemployment; students and young workers in Italy, France, Germany and above all Greece have been out on the streets demonstrating their rage against a society which offers them no future. The anger of the workers in the refineries is not specific to Britain but part of an international response to the deepening economic disaster.

Nationalism leads to a dead-end

However, the main slogan raised in the energy strikes - "British jobs for British workers" - can only lead the workers into a complete dead end.

The threat to the jobs of workers in the power industry or anywhere else does not come from a ship-load of Italian and Portuguese workers who are being used by a network of British, US, and Italian firms to cheapen labour costs. Capitalism doesn't give a jot about the nationality of those it exploits. It only cares about how much profit it can extract from them. But it is more than happy when workers are set against each other, when they are divided up into competing national groups. The idea of "British jobs for British workers" is directly opposed to the ability of workers to defend themselves. This is because they can only stand up for their interests if their struggles extend as widely as possible and bring all workers, regardless of nationality, into a common resistance against their exploiters. Workers in the UK have no interests in common with British bosses and the British state and everything in common with so-called ‘foreign' workers, who face the same threat of unemployment and poverty because the crisis of capitalism is a world-wide crisis.

Trade unions peddle the nationalist delusion

The main force pushing the nationalist delusion in this conflict has been the Unite and GMB trade unions who have taken up Gordon Brown's slogan - itself filched from the British National Party - and placed it at the centre of the movement. This is not the first time the unions have tried to peddle the "British jobs for British workers" line. Last year building workers on a construction site at a power plant in Plymouth were laid off by the contractor. Other workers walked out in solidarity with their comrades. The union tried to argue that workers from Poland on the site were taking "British" jobs. This rang very hollow when these Polish workers joined the strike. The union which had protested so loudly about British workers being laid off then made a deal with the bosses to get the striking workers back to work and to leave the laid-off workers unemployed.

The media have also played a big part in spreading the nationalist message. Normally they are very quiet when workers take unofficial action or engage in illegal solidarity strikes, but they have been giving maximum publicity to this conflict, constantly focussing on the "British" placards and slogans.

Although there's no denying that the workers in the oil refineries and power stations have swallowed the nationalist bait to some extent, reality is much more complex, as can be seen from this statement by an unemployed worker protesting outside a Welsh power station: "I was laid off as a stevedore two weeks ago. I've worked in Cardiff and Barry Docks for 11 years and I've come here today hoping that we can shake the government up. I think the whole country should go on strike as we're losing all British industry. But I've got nothing against foreign workers. I can't blame them for going where the work is." (The Guardian On-line 20.1.2009). Other workers in the industry have themselves made the point that thousands of oil and construction workers from Britain are currently working abroad.

The future is the international class struggle

In the face of an economic crisis of devastating proportions, it is not surprising that workers will find it difficult to find the most effective way of defending themselves. The energy workers have shown a real desire to organise themselves, spread the struggle and demonstrate in support of comrades in other plants and other parts of the country, but the nationalist slogan they have adopted is going to be used against the whole working class and its ability to unite.

The ruling class has no solution to this crisis, a crisis of overproduction which has been gathering pace for decades. It can no longer conjure it away with further injections of credit - the resulting mountain of debt is obviously part of the problem. And closing each country up behind protectionist barriers - which is the logic of "British jobs for British workers" - was already shown in the 1930s to be a way of sharpening competition between nation states and dragging workers off to war.

The working class has no immediate or local solutions to the economic catastrophe. But it can defend itself against the attempts of capitalism to make it pay for the crisis. And by uniting in self-defence, across all divisions and borders, it can start to discover that it has a historic answer to the collapse of capitalism: an international revolution and a new world society based on human solidarity and not capitalist profit.

The class struggle is for all workers!

Comments

Display the following comment

  1. Union called for equal rights- for all! — Lol
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech