Alistair Tice, Socialist Party Yorkshire
Rotherham Pay the Rate protest, March 2016

Rotherham Pay the Rate protest, March 2016   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

“Pay the rate, pay the rate!” chanted 200 engineering construction workers protesting outside the new biomass power station being built in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. The blockade by members of general unions GMB, Unite and building union Ucatt stopped work on the site for the day.

The rate under national industry agreement should be £16-£64 an hour. But the largely migrant workforce is being paid €9 an hour (about £7). With around half the protesters unemployed at the current time, it’s no wonder they are angry at the exploitation of migrant labour at the expense of local employment.

“This is just the start” said union officials, with similar protests taking place on the same day, 1 March, in Wales and Scotland. The engineering construction unions’ National Shop Stewards Forum meets on 15-16 March and should call more co-ordinated protests and a national one-day strike.

How can the bosses get away with this ‘race to the bottom’?

The local Labour council gave planning consent in 2011 but made no provision for adherence to collective agreements or local employment. Babcock & Wilcox Volund (BWV) and Interserve were contracted to design, construct and then operate the plant.

BWV refused the trade unions’ demand that the project include the terms of a national construction industry agreement.

The company then sub-contracted the construction of the boiler to a Croatian firm, the same company that unions caught underpaying migrant workers last year at a power station in Yorkshire.

Because that job came under the national agreement, unions were able to force the company to repay every euro they owed their workers, only to find out from a worker via e-mail that when they got back to Croatia, also an EU member, the money was retaken from their wages under duress!

The European Union Posted Workers Directive only gives workers ‘posted’ to work temporarily in another EU country the protection of the host country’s minimum standards – meaning bosses can pay below the rate and legally get away with it if not covered by the agreement.

So much for the Trade Union Congress claim that the EU protects workers. No wonder nearly every construction worker wants out of the bosses’ EU.

The overwhelming attitude was to stop the exploitation of migrant workers by trying to get them to join a union and a united fight against the bosses undermining hard-won terms and conditions.

Many of the protesters had been involved in the 2009 Lindsey Oil Refinery strikes, the last time industry workers protested across the country. They recognise that struggle would have to be repeated to win again.