But the truth turned out to be rather different and more complex. Bill Mullins, of the Socialist Party (based in England), writes on a victorious action to defend trade union rights and details the deal done between the Lindsey oil refinery strike committee and the Total oil company, the refinery owners.

This deal has set the benchmark for dozens of other sites throughout Britain and in fact throughout Europe. This heroic struggle by 1,000 plus construction engineers in the refinery (supported by walk-outs in 20 plus other sites as well) who were working on different contracts throughout the site in north Lincolnshire has resulted in a victory for the workers.

 
It was a victory against the bosses of Total (the French oil company that owns the site) but also against the whole neo-liberal regime that operates across the EU. In the process, it exposed the anti-union laws as irrelevant when the mass of workers move into struggle.

The workers have been guaranteed 102 of the 198 jobs that are available in that part of the contract inside the refinery that was building a new chemical facility (HDS3).

The original contractor Shaw’s, had been told that they had lost part of the work to an Italian company, IREM, who would bring in their own workforce from Italy and elsewhere to do the jobs. As a result Shaw’s had told the shop stewards on the site that some of their members would be made redundant from 17 February to make way for the Italian workers.

What was crucial in this was not the fact that they were Italian or Portuguese but that they would not be part of the national agreement for the engineering and construction industry (NAECCI). Why? Because under the EU directives, backed up by the European Court of Human Rights, this would be seen as a "restraint on trade" and therefore against the freedom of movement of labour and capital enshrined in the EU capitalist club’s rules and regulations.

It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that this is a bosses charter and nothing else. The bosses like nothing better than to have full freedom to do what they like without the trade unions interfering (in this case the British trade unions but it goes for any Europe trade union as well).

The press gave prominence to the slogan used by some workers of ‘British jobs for British workers’, held up by some of the strikers at the mass meetings. It failed to see (and how could you expect the rabid capitalist press to do anything else) that the strikers’ case was simple. That was that they were being excluded from jobs on the site by the sleight of hand of the bosses under the cover of ‘the right of labour and capital to be shifted without restriction to any part of the EU’.

 
No workers' movement is 'chemically pure'. Elements of confusion, and even some reactionary ideas, can exist, and have done in these strikes. However, fundamentally this struggle is aimed against the 'race to the bottom', at maintaining trade union-organised conditions and wages on these huge building sites.

The existing one-sided EU laws and directives give the bosses complete carte blanche to bring in workers to work on less pay and worse conditions in the ‘host country’ as long as the minimum conditions of their home country is applied. They do not have to be in a union and it was clear that the IREM workers were not in a union, Italian or otherwise. Italian union confederation CGIL leader Sabrina Petrucci told the Morning Star (6 February) that IREM is a notorious non-union firm.

But the struggle was more even than this. It was a struggle for control of the workplace by the workers themselves. If the Total managers, as owners of the site, and the Italian contractors IREM could have had their way, they would have driven a huge wedge into these elements of workers control that had been wrested from the management on the site over the whole previous period.

 
As part of the deal and in a major breakthrough, it allows for the shop stewards to check that the jobs filled by the Italian and Portuguese workers are on the same conditions as the local workers covered by the NAECI agreement. (The Lindsey oil refinery is what is known as a blue book site and all workers on it are covered by the NAECI agreement). This means in practice that, on a day-to-day basis, the union-organised workers will be working alongside the IREM-employed Italian workers and will be able to audit whether or not this is the case.
This was a fundamental demand of the strikers when they adopted a central list of demands at the mass meetings including all workers in UK to be covered by NAECI Agreement and all immigrant labour to be unionised.

As an extra safeguard to maintaining trade union organisation in the sites the strikers also accepted a demand put forward by the strike committee of the need for ‘Union-controlled registering of unemployed and local skilled union members’.

This is exactly what the capitalists do not want and from their point of view, it is indeed a ‘restraint on trade’, i.e. their right to exploit their workforce without the union having any say in it. Built into the agreement as well is that the shop stewards on the site will be able to keep the Italian company in check by regular liaison meetings.

The alternative to trade union control over ‘hire and fire’ is the bosses having that right instead and who will they give jobs to? Not the trade union activists, as is too often the case a bosses’ black-list is widely used in the industry. The fight for this demand to be put into practice will be part of the ongoing struggle between the workers and the bosses for who controls the workplace and, therefore, in whose interests will the workplace be run.

To their shame some on the left were completely taken in by the headlines in the capitalist press which highlighted the ‘British jobs for British workers’ elements of this struggle. What they did not realise or refused to face up to was that the whole previous period had led to this battle. If this had developed a year ago then it is likely that it would not have happened as it did. What was new in the equation was the rapid onset of mass unemployment threatening every worker in Britain and across much of the globe. The economic crisis has created a fear amongst workers not just for their jobs today but what jobs will there be for their children in the future.

In the previous period it was possible for the workers to get jobs on other sites. A feature of the sites was the blacklisting of union activists for different sites which has led to localised battles in the past in the ongoing class struggle over who runs the sites, the management or the unions.

Now the whole workforce of some 25,000 of this particular trade who specialise in the skilled construction engineering required on major projects such as oil refineries and power stations were becoming increasingly aware that things were changing. In fact some 1,500 at least of that number were unemployed.

The trade unions were preparing through the shop stewards organising on a national level to take the bosses on. But the whole thing was precipitated suddenly when Total gave the contract to IREM before Christmas (or at least gave it to an American company who in turn sub-contracted it out to IREM).

The timing of this was not an accident. The Total bosses were using the downturn in the economy to give the work to a contractor who did not have to bother with trade unions as most of the British contractors on these major building project were forced to do under normal circumstances.

The capitalist politicians like Labour business minister Pat McFadden bleated that the principle of free movement had been breached by the deal. He meant ‘freedom’ for the bosses to move labour about the continent, hiding under the EU laws backed up by the courts and against the interests of the workers everywhere to undermine trade union organisation.

This ‘freedom’ has indeed been breached by the strike which has in the process struck a blow against the race to the bottom and has introduced a more level playing field.

What it opens up now is the need for much more coordination amongst all the European unions and particularly the shop stewards organisations, at site level but also at national and indeed on an all-European level as well to come together in a massive campaign to spread the victory of the Lindsey oil refinery workers across the whole country and the EU.

This article first appeared in The Socialist newspaper, and is reprinted here in an edited format