By Kevin McKenna
SOME of the more seductive offerings of the Yes movement have been
constructed around Scotland’s status as a world leader in the renewable
energy sector.
Scotland’s felicitous climate and geography are key factors in our ability
to harness and exploit a limitless bounty bequeathed to us by nature. The
numbers involved are startling and mostly beyond dispute and they convey
the hope that in an independent Scotland they can form a cornerstone of our
future economy.
In 2017 our country had a record year for creating eco-friendly energy with
more than two-thirds of electricity having been produced from green schemes
– an increase of 26 per cent on the year before. According to the Scottish
Government this was 45 percent higher than that produced by the rest of the
UK. The picture of Scotland as a renewable Xanadu was enhanced further by
34% and 9% increases in wind generation and hydro respectively. We have
thus become one of the world’s top countries for providing electricity from
non-fossil fuel sources. We produce 25% of Europe’s tidal and offshore wind
resource along the biggest coastline of any other country in the British
Isles.
Extravagantly optimistic job projections claims in this arena ought to be
treated with caution. The opportunity to build a robust and sustainable
economy around these figures is undeniable but Scotland has a patchy
history in this area owing to questionable employment practices and recent
European legislation.
There are also some uncomfortable and inconvenient questions to be faced
about Britain’s previous relationship with the EU and the degree to which
trade union protections of workers have been stealthily eroded in this
sector. According to one senior Scottish trade union official I spoke with
this week – and this is a view shared by many of his colleagues in the
movement – Scotland has become “a bit-part player in our own market and one
that’s been dominated by state-subsidised European energy companies and Far
East finance”.
Many of these factors were evident in the lamentable returns Scottish
workers gained from the manufacturing work on the Beatrice Offshore
windfarm on the Moray Firth. Scotland received around 3% of the
manufacturing work for this project which was worth £2.6Bn, encompassed 100
wind turbines and is expected to generate enough electricity to power
900,000 homes. Even so, Burntisland Fabrication were supplying only a third
of wind turbine jackets and were forced to sack hundreds of workers before
receiving a £15m Scottish Government bail-out after it encountered
difficulties with one sub-contractor.
Ownership of this project was split across companies originating in
Portugal, Spain, Japan, France and China. The turbines themselves will be
built and delivered by Siemens (German) and Vestas (Denmark) while the
cabling will be provided by an assortment of firms including Boskalis from
the Netherlands. The contracts for the manufacture of the turbine jackets
have been awarded to Lamprell, based in the United Arab Emirates and
Smelders in Belgium. Unions and industry figures were particularly incensed
about the Lamprell contract award. The company ran at a loss on previous UK
windfarm projects but the tax and employment advantages they have along
with the sovereign wealth fund investment worked in their favour.
The Green energy twins to offshore renewable projects in Scotland have been
the publicly-funded biomass plants popping up across Scotland, among which
the one at Dundee is typical.
The city will lose more than 1,000 jobs next year with cuts at Michelin and
local building firm McGills which went into administration earlier this
month. The GMB Union believes that a logical argument for the
diversification of those workers would be into construction and trades and
thus deliver the vital Energy for Waste project at Baldovie.
A distressing factor underpinning this generic fragility in offshore and
onshore energy projects presents some ethical dilemmas for the left. The
steady erosion of trade union influence has seen previously negotiated
industry minimums swept aside by under-cutting. In the case of Dundee it
means there is little chance of those lost jobs being transferred. This
practice became enshrined in EU law in 2007 and effectively permits firms
to pay wages to foreign workers at the reduced rates of their countries of
origin. It arose from the landmark Viking and Laval cases. In Laval, 14
Latvian construction workers hired by a Swedish firm could be paid around
40% less than the nationally agreed rates in the Swedish construction
industry. A similar situation arose from a Finnish ferry firm flying a flag
of convenience to circumnavigate national agreements in Finland.
The ramifications have been as profound as Taff Vale in 1901, when it was
ruled that trade unions could be liable for a company’s losses arising from
strike action. Gordon Brown was foolish and clumsy when he talked about
British jobs for British workers. Since then, though, the British left has
been sleep-walking as the hard right Brexiteers have exploited unhappiness
in working class communities where sustainable wages have been undercut in
this way. It’s simplistic and lazy to dismiss those working class people
who voted to leave the EU as racist or anti-immigrant. The Viking and Laval
rulings should have been a red flag for the Labour Party of how real
racists might exploit fears in some communities over the next decade.
In Scotland over the last few years we have witnessed a chain of industrial
disputes with under-cutting at their source occurring at Polmadie in
Glasgow (the sub contractor was sacked in 2016 and the agency workers
walked out); at Dunbar and Millerhill. These occur where large public
sector contracts are awarded to overseas firms who then sub-divide and
sub-contract the work into tiny and barely-sustainable packages for smaller
Scottish firms. Trade unions are locked out and treated with disdain simply
for seeking to protect real wages and humane conditions.
Recent high-profile disputes in Scotland are portrayed in simplistic ways:
Scottish Government and Cosla struggling under UK austerity to make the
numbers work; unreasonable trade unions being pig-headed. Usually, the
unions are seeking to defend their lowest-paid members from wage cuts and
seeking to ensure a livelihood sufficient to sustain a family.
A class of trouser-press philanthropists has emerged in Scotland in the
last 20 years which gets a fit of the vapours over the defence industry or
old sources of energy. It’s time for them to get real because real jobs are
at stake.
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