The lesson learned from the Vestas dispute is that workers are only protected if they’re in a union

By Johanna Baxter

Employees at Vestas were informed of the proposed loss of 525 jobs on the Isle of Wight and 100 jobs in Southampton on the 30th April. You could be forgiven for being surprised by this decision given the company’s better-than-expected 51% rise in its full-year operating profit, 2009 sales and profit forecasts.

The company’s press release makes it clear that the decision was taken because “Despite the UK government’s strong commitment to renewable energy – which was reconfirmed on 15 July 2009 by its Low Carbon Transition Plan – the local planning process for the construction of new onshore wind power plants in the UK remains an obstacle to the development of a more favourable market for onshore wind power.”

Since then the company has complied with its legal obligations to consult employee representatives in the event of proposed redundancies.

On the 20th July 25 employees began the occupation of the site on the Isle of Wight, although by all accounts this occupation is of one floor of the plant and managers continue to work in the rest of the plant whilst bringing the workers food. This has facilitated direct discussions between management representatives and those occupying the site where workers were informed of the possible consequences of their actions.

At least 5 people have been arrested at the plant since the beginning of the occupation and the company has now dismissed 11 that could be identified as being part of the occupation.

The RMT union, which is calling for the government to nationalise the plant, condemned the move as “vindictive and aggressive”.

That may be so but Bob Crow’s assertion that this is about “the right to protection from companies who abuse the law to hire and fire” unhelpfully clouds the issue. Whilst the treatment of these workers is clearly appalling the company has not actually broken any law here.

Their defence will be that the workers have engaged in unlawful industrial action which has allowed the company to lawfully dismiss them on the basis that they have breached their contract of employment. There was no declared dispute with the employer, no ballot of union members endorsing the action and no notification to the company that the action would take place. However much we in the union movement might disagree with the cumbersome and prohibitive legislation around industrial action it is the law and if our member’s jobs are to be protected then it must be complied with. These workers are not members of a trade union so probably did not realise the ramifications of their actions at the time. Had they been unionised, any union worth their salt would never have allowed that to happen.

So is this a recruitment opportunity for trade unions? I’d say yes, albeit with some qualification.

If the publicity surrounding this dispute highlights the benefits of union membership to a wider audience that is obviously a good thing.

However the power of any union, and its ability to influence employers, lies in the strength of its membership.

Some unions will recruit members from any industry and any grade. Whilst this generally provides higher membership numbers, and therefore income, initially many of these members will only remain in membership for a short time because they will quickly find that a union without good workplace representative structures is less able to provide a consistently good level of service than those with.

Others have a more strategic approach and direct their recruitment resources into areas in which they can currently – or in the near future will be able to – feasibly represent their interests to, and exert some influence in, the companies in which these members are employed. These unions tend not simply to recruit individuals but to organise members collectively – there is a difference. In organising, the union is committing resources to developing members into activists, empowering activists, creating strong workplace representative structures and developing relationships with the companies in which these members are employed. These unions usually shout less but are able to achieve more in the individual workplaces where they are recognised.

One might question why it is that the RMT has become the vanguard of workers of Vestas when this is not a workforce that would naturally fit their current industrial base – indeed it is Unite that are currently hold recognition for collective bargaining in their offshoot Vestas Celtic Wind Technology.

The current economic difficulties are posing industrial relation difficulties across all industries and it would be unrealistic to expect that there would be no redundancies anywhere. But a recognised trade union involved at the formative stage of these proposals could have negotiated with the company to save jobs, seek alternatives to redundancy including re-skilling and redeployment to other areas of the business, better redundancy terms and, significantly, used their industry and political contacts to exert pressure on the company to seek alternatives. You only have to compare this with the announcement of £45million investment in low carbon technology which will create jobs and boost growth across the country in highly unionised Rolls-Royce to see the difference collective representation can make.

The fact that the Vestas workforce was only rallied to action following the intervention of the Workers Climate Action Group and Bob Crow’s determination to “drag the government kicking and screaming into this row” (and that there is a clear link between these two organisations – just Google the two together) suggests that the workers situation is being exploited for political purposes rather than in a bid to positively influence the employer. This opportunism is also, I fear, false hope to those affected. The RMT is in a position of trying to represent non-union members who have already breached their contracts and whatever political pressure they can bring to bear will pail into insignificance if they do not have a dialogue with the employer.

The court’s decision to refuse the company’s bid to secure a possession order on the factory is a welcome stay of execution but decisions will need to be made quickly to resolve the dispute.

Chris Cook’s proposed decentralised network of community energy co-operatives has a lot to commend it but will remain reliant on getting planning applications through local authorities. The idea of local communities agreeing to wind farms in their area because they get something back from it is not new (although as a different type of incentive, Councils are already implementing schemes to reward residents for local renewable energy development) with Kettering Borough Council planning to offer energy efficiency measures for residents from a £10,000 annual fund paid for by the Burton Wold wind farm.

Whilst local communities may be more favourable to this approach because they have more to gain I fear it does not address the fact that most planning applications fail because of an all-too-common ‘not in my backyard’ attitude. (And this is a political issue because as Greenpeace’s research demonstrates Conservative-run local councils turned down more than three times as many wind farms as they approved between December 2005 and November 2008. Labour-controlled councils approved marginally more projects than they turned down.)

Unfortunately I fear too that his Venture Communism will also fail to gain momentum amongst a workforce which has been happy to shun collective action until now.

Of course it would be madness for a turbine plant to close due to a lack of on-shore demand in the UK at a time when we are supposed to be investing in a green economy as an investment in our future and a solution to the current economic difficulties. The government seriously needs to look at local government planning legislation to fix this issue because that is clearly where the issue lies.

In the meantime the government could of course make it a condition of its £6m funding of Vestas off-shore research and development facility that the work on this facility is brought forward (it’s currently scheduled to open in 2011) and that some of the blade factory employees are retrained for those jobs. The government could intervene to ‘speed up’ the placing of some blade orders and provide a short term working scheme to keep workers on until the business picks up. And of course all of these will have to be supported by local job creation schemes.

Ultimately though the message to employees across all industries is that you are much less likely to end up in this situation if you are a member of a union. My advice is to join before the worst happens so that your union is in a position to help.