LETTER TO LABOUR MPs FROM WILTS & SWINDON GMB BRANCH
(Wiltshire and Swindon GMB voted at our last branch committee to write to our MPs. This is what we wrote. An identical letter was sent to Michael Wills MP for North Swindon. By coincidence I bumped into Anne just a few hours after I posted this, as she was leafleting my boys’ primary school.)
25th February 2009
Anne Snelgrove MP
7 Little London Court,
Albert Street,
Swindon,
SN1 3HY
POSTED WORKERS DIRECTIVE
Dear Anne,
I am sure that you were as concerned as we were that sensational and misleading TV and media reporting of the recent unofficial strike at Lindsey Oil Refinery gave the impression that this was a protest against immigrant and migrant workers.
In fact, the origin of the dispute was that the Italian contracting firm, IREM, were advertising jobs only in Italy, and employing workers on Italian contracts, at Italian rates of pay, regulated by Italian employment law. IREM are also a non-union firm, operating outside industry wide collective agreements between unions and the construction industry employers.
As such this was not a dispute about the free movement of labour, but the free movement of services, in particular the fact that a foreign sub-contractor was not bound by collective agreements in Britain.
As the law stands, global companies based in Europe are free under EU law to tender for British building and service contracts and to hire their own direct labour force; and posted workers in the UK have to be paid only the statutory minimum wage, which has the effect of undermining union negotiated collective agreements which are not recognised as `universally applicable’ in the UK.
Such a practice in the building and construction industry should have been specifically protected against by Article 3(8) of the 1996 EU Posted Workers Directive.
But the British government implementation of the Directive in UK law goes no further than requiring base-line standards are met, like the statutory minimum wage, and working time directive. Since December 2007 numerous European Court judgments, including the Viking, Laval and Ruffert judgments, have all interpreted EU law to the benefit of unscrupulous employers, allowing them to pit nationalities against one another in a race to the bottom on pay and conditions.
Despite pledges to resolve this matter in the Warwick Agreement with the trade unions, and a specific manifesto pledge to reform the Posted Workers Directive in 2005, the government has yet to protect workers in Britain from unfair competition.
This issue is of particular concern to Wiltshire and Swindon W15 branch, because we have many migrant worker members, and our fear is that opposition to unscrupulous behaviour by foreign employers can spill over into hostility to foreign workers.
Our union branch would like to ask your assistance in making our case to the government that effective reform of the EU Posted Workers Directive is necessary so that employers posting workers to the UK are required to observe the terms of appropriate collective agreements as well as minimum terms laid down in statute.
Can you please ask ministers when such a reform might be anticipated?
Yours fraternally
Andy Newman
Equality Officer, acting for the Branch Secretary
Wiltshire and Swindon GMB
According to Stephen Sackur interviewing Derek Simpson on last night’s Hardtalk on BBC News, an ACAS report on the dispute found that IREM were respecting industry agreements and paying the going rate. A friend of mine pointed out that all they had seemed to do is use their own settled workforce rather than recruit locally. I might suggest that it is false claims of unscrupulousness by foreign employers (and the implication that British employers are not) that are liable to lead to attacks on migrant workers, but as you respond to any diagreement with claims that you’ve done more for migrants than anyone since Moses perhaps I’d better not.
Comment by skidmarx — 28 February, 2009 @ 11:56 am
Skidmarx. Yes, of course, workers are going to sit meekly on the dole whilst foreign contractors are brought in to work in front of them. You are one of the biggest fools in the blogosphere. You are wrong on everything always. There is nothing wrong with the slogan British Jobs for British Workers in the context of this dispute. If you think any worker is going to follow a stupid sect that argues British Jobs for Italian Workers you are just a provocateur. Workers know what is in their interests and they will pursue them rightly so. The left’s support for the neo-liberal EU and its faith in imperialism to lead Europe into some socialist utopia is backfiring big style and has made it anti-working class. The working class has to lead the nation out of this economic catastrophe in opposition to imperialist capitalism. Abstract internationalism is just crass middle class bullshit. True internationalism demands the end of the anti-working class EU and struggle for a United Socialist States of Europe in which workers can find employment where they live without being forced to tramp across the globe.
Comment by Arsewipe — 28 February, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
Arsewipe - that’s about as measured as the usual responses here. Should Italian workers protest against British workers in Italy? And should workers only be able to work within a five mile radius of where they were born? At least you don’t deny the centrality of the BJ4BW slogan to the dispute (though once again I’d like to praise those, especially in the Socialist Party, that have tried to steer it away from narrow bigotry).
Comment by skidmarx — 28 February, 2009 @ 3:19 pm
Skidmarx:
Why are you so determined to believe what the bosses told ACAS rather than what (a) two IREM workers told ITV news, (b) the strikers on the ground say and (c) common sense suggests?
A most peculiar attitude for a “socialist”.
Comment by Mark P — 28 February, 2009 @ 4:08 pm
Skidmarx.
Why cant IREM PROVE that the are paying the same rates?
Comment by Ian — 28 February, 2009 @ 9:17 pm
Time to move on I think Skidmarx. You’re beginning to sound like you WANT your version of events to be true.
Unison must demand The Posted Workers Directive be amended and or National agreements become “universal”
Comment by paulv — 1 March, 2009 @ 12:16 am