refinery strikes

Cross posted at liberalconspiracy. 

Photo: Fremantle careworker at a strike rally, November 2007.

The recent British Jobs for British Workers union strikes sparked a big debate on whether UK firms were right to employ people from Europe to undercut local workers.

We may want to allow Europeans the opportunity to work in the UK, but how far should this go?

It is not unusual for British firms to now actively look for staff outside the country and undermine conditions bargained for here. In fact, these laws offer firms unprecedented bargaining power to companies.

Around 2006, local carehome company Fremantle Trust sent representatives to Hungary to recruit people to work in its Barnet care-homes.

Local careworkers were suffering at the time: at the end of 2006, the trust revealed a harsh new employment contract for local careworkers who'd been transferred from Barnet council to the trust's employ when the council outsourced its care contracts.

With the new employment contract, Fremantle careworkers lost the weekend enhancement pay many depended on for a liveable wage, as well as their longstanding sick leave and annual leave allowances.

The cuts meant that some careworkers lost as much as £300 a month in salary immediately. Told to sign the new contract or leave, the careworkers entered a bitter industrial dispute with the trust - a dispute that has yet to be resolved. Offshore recruitment was interpreted as an attempt to source workers on inferior terms and conditions.

"We were concerned about why they needed to go so far to recruit," Barnet Unision branch secretary John Burgess told me. "It felt like they were trying to import cheap but grateful workers. We were concerned for their term and conditions. We had no involvement in the recruitment, and so had no knowledge about what training they had."

He said that not many of the workers recruited in Hungary stayed long at Fremantle carehomes. Care-worker and union organiser Lango Gamanga said the few Hungarian workers who were still working in Fremantle carehomes would not want to speak on the record in case their employment was affected.

Fremantle's representatives have not responded to repeated requests for comment on the union's concerns or to this article.