1,600 engineering workers recently downed tools and walked out at Hinkley Point C, the much-touted and comically expensive new nuclear power station currently under construction in Somerset, England.
This ‘action short of a strike’ – which was in reality, all but in name, a wildcat strike – was staged in protest at the lack of fingerprint scanners. These allow workers to enter the site and begin work.
With only five scanners available for over 13,000 workers, it would simply be impossible to get everyone on site in an orderly manner without risk – one of many small indignities workers have had to endure, such as unsanitary transport and site overcrowding in general.
Shamefully, EDF – which owns Britain’s nuclear plants and is heading the Hinkley Point C project – has been quick to deny the veracity of the workers’ grievances, and the local press has happily reprinted the bosses’ lies.
Whenever the bosses want their statement carried, our ‘free’ and ‘fearless’ newspaper companies are always happy to oblige – but try and get a statement from the workers’ side through and see what happens!
Hinkley Point C has already seen its fair share of fights. Workers of all kinds have taken action several times at Hinkley Point over the last three years, principally over attempted deskilling and other attacks on terms and conditions.
The construction monopolies at Hinkley Point as elsewhere are notorious for their grasping attempts to squeeze more work for less pay out of their workforces.
This, in turn, provokes site workers to band together – often unofficially, in the teeth of their own trade union bureaucracies – in order to fight back.
Indeed, a small strike had already occurred on the site in early November when supply chain workers, organised with Prospect, walked out over a 4-year failure to gain a pay increase.
At the time of writing, most of the workers who walked out have since agreed to return to site, following a 2,000 worker-strong meeting with management.
However, many are unhappy with this resolution, stating that they feel that nothing has been resolved.
And they are quite right to mistrust the bosses, too! Some of these workers have even claimed that planned strike action, set for 2 December, was prevented when their site passes were blocked – a bosses’ lockout, in other words.
Whatever promises EDF have made won’t be enough to put this struggle to bed. Past experience has shown what such promises are worth. Hinkley Point workers will be on their guard, and the next walkout may not be so easily talked down.