Crude Operators
Workers’ Rights (workshop)

Fari (involved with a national campaign to get support for the oil workers in Iran); Juliet Peck (journalist, researcher on multinational companies); Farah (Earth First!); Helen Newing (Trees, a support group for communities in Peru, and Earth Love Fund, a fund-giver for community groups across forest areas; Jane (Platform); Bob (Ecumenical Council of Corporate Responsibility, a churches-backed organisation on industrial questions); Martin (Earth First!).

FARI - When you look at a map, there are patches of the world with oil interests and oil industry where workers have no rights - I tell you in Saudi Arabia and some parts of the Persian Gulf there are no trade union activities - in Kuwait there is no recognition of any trade union rights, although three or four years ago there was some sort of a strike in Kuwait, but that was very limited.

In Iran, there has been a long history of trade union movements. I can tell you that in Iran during the Shah’s time, pre-1979, the recognition of some sort of collective bargaining - it wasn’t official, but because of the industrial weight of the oil workers, they managed to extract some sort of minimum standards from the Shah’s government. But after the revolution - the Ayatollah came to power, and the war with Iraq, a lot of that has been taken away. But it’s only recently in the last three or four years the oil workers have started to re-organise, although the organisation is not recognised, but effectively they have been organising on the ground - they have their own networks, basically. They don’t have officials - because the organisation is not recognised, so you can’t have reps - if you elect reps, officially - you know, they disappear. For everything they have to fight - that’s quite clear. To get recognition for the basic rights they have to go on strike - they have to put on demonstrations.

But because of their numbers, basically, and because of the strategic position of the oil industry, the oil workers have very strong positions - industrial positions. In Iran the government doesn’t recognise any rights, but there is a balance of power that exists and they’re using it - recently, for example, to ask for wage rises. And usually when they do go on strike, the whole scene of industrial relations changes. In 1992 when they went on strike for two weeks - in about four or five oil refineries - as a result of that there was a 36% rise in pay in the whole country, not just the oil sector (bearing in mind the inflation is 60%, by the way) - the point is that they have that power that the knock-on effect for the rest of the working people in Iran was that everybody benefited.

So everybody recognises the role of the oil workers. Recently when they went on a two-day strike, the government really panicked - they initially tried to deny that there was a strike in four or five major oil refineries, but later on because the news leaked and everybody started to talk about it, they recognised that there was a strike - a two-day strike in five oil refineries - and then there was a demonstration on 16th December in front of the Ministry of Oil headquarters in Tehran, and because the negotiations broke down - the government did not agree to their demands of collective bargaining, higher pay, better working and medical conditions - the security forces attacked them, and took away over two or three hundred people - put them in prison. They have released them recently - most of them - because of international pressure and our campaign, but there are still some in prison. But they haven’t recognised the right to collective bargaining.

If you get strong trade union recognition, or minimum standards, then it’s to everybody’s interest, because then you’re putting limits on the oil industry - you won’t allow them to operate - to operate production in a situation where the workers have no rights. Oil workers in Iran have contracts, like everywhere else - if you’re an oil worker, you have certain recognitions. Now the government is trying to take that away, the National Iranian Oil Company - trying to create new jobs and new layers of contract - you’ve got a daily contract, you’ve got a monthly contract, and you’ve a yearly contract. So really it is some element of casualisation that is being introduced - also they’re trying to create an unstable working environment - forcing people to do overtime - I mean if you’ve got a daily contract, or a weekly or monthly contract, it’s quite easy for them to force you to do overtime without any pay - that’s the sort of thing they do. The striking thing for me is the uniformity of the working conditions everywhere.

I think on the other issue of jobs and the environment, it’s important to separate the workers from the company - I think that’s very important if you want to be successful in a campaign against the oil industry. We have to be able to separate the workers - the PEOPLE who work - because the people who work in those environments are the people who are living around the oil refineries, naturally, and these are the people who are going to, in the long term, suffer the consequences - the environmental and other consequences of oil industries.

JANE - Somebody we worked with did a lot of investigative journalism about workers’ rights - oil workers’ rights in England - and specifically he looked at the Essex refineries - Shell Haven and Coryton - and the fact that there’s been de-recognition of trade union rights, which has been common in Britain anyway, and also therefore rates of pay, the whole conditions, pay - an incredible reversal of working conditions, even within our own oil industry. The article he wrote had the title “Human rights abuse in Essex”, because we’re accustomed, as residents of the UK, to hearing of human rights abuse over there somewhere, but the fact is that there seems to be - not only in post-Tory Britain, but just in the industry in general, a tendency to divide and rule. There’s definitely been backward sliding in the case of BP and Shell and Mobil in Essex. How do you deal with the fact that the industry itself is causing such damage both locally and globally, and that it employs all these people - and their rights are being eroded - even in Essex?

HELEN - Well, that can actually work in your favour, can’t it? Because if they were giving them a good deal, it would be far harder to campaign against them. What we found in Peru is the oil company goes in offering something below the minimum wage, and no health security or anything else, which means that they immediately lose the public support, which would otherwise been quite widespread for them - so they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

JANE - Well I think - this is what I was going to say - that it would be interesting to talk to Tim [Deere-Jones] from Milford Haven, because given the Sea Empress disaster - I would be interested to know - my prediction would be that the union rights within Milford Haven have been maintained - the local collective bargaining rights have been maintained - because it is in their interests to keep the workers happy. Whereas in Essex, which is London fringe - a very unstable area, anyway, economically - you can fracture the work force much more easily because people are used to commuting long distances to work in the South East. In talking with tanker drivers, which has to be the most unspecialised skill required for the oil industry - even there they’re being paid per mile for their journeys to deliver across London, but not paid for how long it takes - so they’ll be paid the same to make a delivery even if it’s in the middle of rush hour, which will take twice as long as if it’s at night. So there are all kinds of things going on that is actually creating - and this is an opportunity I think - discontent and lack of allegiance to the industry. Yet it’s such a specialised industry at the other end of the scale.

HELEN - But this thing that Tim was talking about - about oil workers - people working for the refineries or whatever getting positions of power in the local councils and so on, is definitely something that oil companies play on to get the local communities behind them and stop you playing on that outside aspect of working rights, which is conditions surrounding families, and so on. It’s something we’ve found very much in the Tropics - that an oil company goes in and the first thing it does is identify community leaders and give jobs either to them or their brothers or close relatives or whatever, so they then have two conflicting roles - one representing the community, and the other allowing a member of their family to bring in revenue by working for the oil companies.

JULIET - Very cynical - it creates all sorts of pressure within a community - it breaks up the community basically.

JANE - It’s divide and rule.

HELEN - But I suppose it’s true for campaigners that most people in the local area aren’t asking for the company to leave - they are asking for improvements in working conditions and a greater share of profits, and campaigners really have to follow what the people on the ground are saying.

BOB - I’m sure if you asked the people working - as far as I’ve been told - if you ask the Nigerians who are working for Shell in the Delta, they would say that they wanted their jobs to continue, and they actually had better conditions, because so many of them are, remember, against the local community, and of course a lot of the local community are depending upon anybody who is working for Shell...

HELEN - That’s right, which is this divide and rule policy again. I was at a meeting last December with some Ogoni people, and they were saying that Shell went in and would identify community leaders, and then employ people very close to their families, so the family would then put pressure on the community leaders to say, “stop speaking out against Shell, because we’ll lose this income to the family”, so that’s divide and rule. But the problem is the people on the ground do give a mixed message because people getting salaries want to continue getting salaries, whilst other members of their community and even their family members will be seeing destruction of farmland, the poisoning of the rivers and all these sort of things.

FARI - For people whose only means of survival is their jobs - if you can’t provide alternative jobs - an alternative means of income, it’s impossible to argue that you want to shut them down.

FARAH - It has to come from the ground, otherwise we’re not going to be successful, and in the end they’ll go against what the outside seems to be imposing on them - you’ll be seen as that, and you’ll always be in a minority. So you have to work with people on the ground, but you have to separate between the people who just have the regular jobs, and the community leaders - it’s the actual people on the ground you need to be working with, because once you start having the leaders then they will start getting sucked into the power structure of the people you are fighting.

JULIET - But that’s the whole structure of the culture out there - you have to work with it - people look to their local leaders...

FARAH - But once their local leaders have sold out to the power structure...

JULIET - You’re dealing with centuries and centuries of tradition and culture, and you just can’t change it - I mean, people willingly look to their leader, even if the leaders abuse it - all over the world.

JANE - How do you deal with the issue of environmental damage - especially the more global issues, which is to do with a degree of scientific education to an extent? I mean we glibly say climate change but there’s lots of issues here to do with the conceptual understanding of the atmosphere there are lots and lots of issues here that are to do with education. Even in Essex - dare I say it - there’s lots of issues that are conceptual leaps that people have to make before they’re going to understand that are beyond their local environmental conditions. But that’s the issue I was going to ask you about - in terms of the black rain and all the visible signs of the industry that people are working in - does that become an issue for striking? Does that become an issue for action?

FARI - It has. Most of the issues that people have struck about is about the pay and conditions, but it’s quite difficult to separate the environmental issues from the working conditions and the living conditions - the people who work in the oil industry are people who live around there, so they are the ones who are the closest to the damage, they are the ones who are poisoned by the pollution, and they are the ones who are killed on the rigs, and god knows what else happens. I think we should emphasise the link between the environmental issues and the safety issues and living conditions. Also connected is the limit that the strong and united workers would put on the oil industry - if you have highly paid, highly organised workers, and a high level of safety in the oil refinery - naturally the consequence is to limit the power of the oil company. I think that’s the way we should approach it when it comes to workers’ rights.

MARTIN - For the workers in this country, the money is quite large. It’s a very well paid business to be in - well, it probably is in your country - and most of the world, really. I mean, the cheapest wage on a North Sea oil rig is a kitchen porter, and he gets about four hundred and fifty pounds a week, which is far advanced of anything - he’d never get that working in London.

JANE - But that’s just the rig, because there’s all the thousands of jobs in the associated industries. Fari - in Iran, is the standard of living of an oil worker higher than ...

FARI - Not necessarily. It depends on what part of the industrial process you work in. If you have a contract that was signed about 25 years ago and you are part of the permanent core of the workers and you are very highly skilled and you work on a rig - dangerous work, and all the bonuses you receive with that - then your income is relatively high, but if you are a manual worker or a worker on a daily contract the pay is not good. But I think on workers’ rights you should move towards identifying safety issues, health issues, certain related environmental issues, and minimum standards of workers’ rights and work on that.

JANE - The parallel with the coal industry I think is very good, because in terms of say, international socialism in the 19th century, the coal workers, certainly in Europe, were very strong, and that was how you achieved improvements in conditions, even though it’s the most hideous industry you can imagine. My family are from South Wales so I have experience of that. There’s one deep pit left open in Wales, which is worker-owned. I don’t know if you know the story about Tower Colliery. You know the pits were all sold off - there are no deep pits left in South Wales that are in public ownership - and the workers did a buy-out at Tower Colliery. What’s interesting to me is that there was all the powerful emotions that surrounded the miners’ strike - and I mean this with respect to the miners - there was a great fight about workers’ rights, but in fact the industry is completely hideous. I always used to have a big problem with saying, well, there’s a contradiction here - you’re outraged about miners’ rights and the closure of the pits, and yet with your ecological hat on you should hate this industry from the moment the first piece of coal was dug from the ground. And how can you celebrate on the one hand Scargill and Women Against Pit Closures and all those things? Yes, we should celebrate people’s right to protest and we should join with those people, but at the same time...and it seems to be a great parallel with the oil industry, except that we have a greater consciousness now of the international impact of oil.

And the only way forward I can see is a networking globally, so that you have that information-sharing which the miners had - miners were very informed people. When we went to Tower Colliery - we went to visit, they had a visitors’ centre - so we went to celebrate the democratic process; we went to see them and buy the T-shirt and say, “yeah, great, you’ve bought the deep mine, good for you guys, workers rights, etc.”, but at the same time we talked to the pit men there and one guy was saying, “I’m going to sell my shares in five years time”. So he wasn’t at all romantic about being a miner and that mining itself should carry on - it was a job and it was a good job on local resources and they’d managed to get their hands on the power to mine it and they’re making profit in the short term, but he wanted to get out and a lot of his colleagues also wanted to get out, so I was very inspired by that reality. I’m just talking about the contradiction between condemning an industry outright, and yet the reformist aspect which is that this colliery itself is good.

HELEN - I think there’s always this argument in anything that if you stop any activity then there will be a loss of jobs, and it can be used to defend nuclear power, the arms industry, absolutely anything, because if you decrease any industry there will be a an immediate loss of jobs, but it’s quite a short term thing - I don’t understand why it is used as a justification for keeping an industry going.

I don’t know if anyone saw Newsnight last night - you know Robin Cook yesterday said that our foreign policy is now going to be based primarily on human rights and the environment. And he was basically being asked how can you possibly reconcile that with protecting British trade interests, and they had a long debate about whether this meant that Britain should start boycotting arms sales to Indonesia, and they were saying, where would you stop? If you start stopping all trade where there’s any ethical problem, you’re going to ruin Britain’s trade position and you’re going to create mass unemployment, and it’s a very real problem.

FARAH - We see it as something that people who are working can’t jump from where they are, so we can’t just close it down, and all of a sudden start something else for all who haven’t got jobs - it seems it’s a process from better pay to better conditions to better health standards to better environmental standards, to co-ops, to you owning it and running it, to changing trade to retraining for a different kind of job that isn’t so damaging - it has to be a whole process. And it can’t come from the top down because then you’re suddenly saying, “well, you’re going to take away all the jobs - what the fuck are we going to do now?”

JANE - Yes - again, excuse the analogy with the coal industry, but if they come in and say, right, we’re going to do this. We’ve got all these jobs lined up for you in, I don’t know - lets think positively - slag heap reclamation, or, you know, anything that we would deem to be positive - a bit like what Francesca from Campaign Against the Arms Trade was saying about positive economic endeavours that would provide jobs. That would have gone down so well - who wants to go down a mine? Nobody wants to go down a mine. Who wants to breathe fumes? Not me. Do you know what I mean? It’s not a positive choice. I think with the mining there was a romance about coal, but it’s not the same with oil - they want a job, and I think that if you’re going to shut things down or agitate to shut things down, you have to provide a real vision of an alternative means of production or economy, and that way not just telling people, “you’re wrong - you’ve got to stop” - you’re actually bringing them into a new way of thinking how they can literally live - literally pay the bills, and it’s not just about barter - it’s about money as well - about cash.

MARTIN - Yeah, we’ve all been very single-issue, very ‘anti’ , and we’ve got to start getting pro more - we’ve got to start putting positive points across - as much as saying “we don’t want this - we can do that”. You see, miners don’t want their sons to go down mines - that’s the last thing they want - they dream of their children not being in mines. And I went down two mines, and my grandfather died of silicosis, and at the actual coal face, it’s just as bad as it was a hundred years ago - in deep mines anyway - it’s pretty horrendous - but what you do with a community that suddenly is without work.

JANE - You see I think this is really hopeful in terms of international understanding of the oil industry. The first Save the Children project in Britain for thirty years is in South Wales - in the Cynon Valley - because they’re starving - they’re hungry - you know, there’s a far closer relationship than ever between issues internationally to do with the energy industry, and Britain. There’s this deunionisation in Essex; there’s the kind of total poverty that you find in a lot of those South Wales valleys. And in a sense the Sea Empress was in a strange way of benefit for ecological understanding because it precipitated local people to think, “oh, there is a down side, folks”. I think we should be looking at these links, and we’re much more equal than we were in a strange way. If we can strengthen those links then I think everybody can begin to understand.

And it’s all about community leaders and bribery and corruption, and it’s all about - this is how the industry works - this is the way transnationals work - this is the way - and it’s happening in Wales, it’s happening in England, and it’s happening in Venezuela...

BOB - One of the problems with workers’ rights internationally has always been enabling you to meet up - because of the expense of getting between distant countries. But I think the information revolution may help - there can be a way in which people can hear about, and learn, and acquire some sort of solidarity. I think it’s beginning to happen.

JANE - But just getting information out of a country can be a dangerous business. Before Christmas, one of the Nigerian oil workers was over here, staying with MOSOP, and we wanted to meet up with him. His name was “John”, and he was a worried man, and you wonder in these corrupt or very autocratic states, and I was just wondering whether there was an equivalent tension in Iran.

FARI - The Iranian government is quite famous for its terrorist activities against its opposition. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about the German court who found that three or four of the assassins who killed Iranian opposition leaders in Germany were directly related to the president and prime minister of Iran. Yes, Iran’s well known for being anti-worker, anti-opposition, anti-anything-that-smells-of-better-living-and-working-conditions. This is the situation in South America and the Middle East. Even in North Sea oil, if the employers realise you are with an industrial liaison committee, then you would be in trouble.

JANE - I think another key point is locality - people going to those refineries, say on the Thames - some of them are driving for miles - you know, typical England - so they’re not local. It would be interesting to know how many people are not local who work at Milford Haven. Non-local people working in those industries are distanced from the immediate local impact, and I think that’s a gap that needs to be bridged, certainly in this country - a gap in understanding - because they’re not getting out of their home and automatically going to work on the refinery - some of them are driving in from Suffolk and Leicestershire and all sorts of places.

HELEN - One interesting thing that certainly Mobil did in Peru - I’ve been looking into the oil exploration phase. When Mobil went in, their management plan said that they would not employ any people from the local Indian communities on whose land they would be exploring for oil, and their reason for this was they didn’t want to upset the community, economic situation, and trade relations - all these sort of things. Which is a very hard one to argue either way, because it has implications in both directions. But, you know, it would certainly be a possible political argument here as well to say, “we’ll only employ people who are not from the local community”, and then they could separate out the effects on the local community from the benefits to oil workers. I don’t know - I haven’t heard that they’re doing that here...
Well, there’s arguments both ways. In the past when oil companies have gone into native community areas, there’ve been all sorts of problems - from increased inequality, right through to prostitution, alcoholism - all these sorts of things. And so they say, “we’re not going to have any dealings with them or employ any of them, and therefore we will avoid all these problems”, but the other side of that is of course then that these local communities are looking on at other people being brought into the area, and earning wages - and often short-term wages, and then some of these people will stay, just as we were hearing about in Milford Haven.

FARAH - That’s what George was talking about earlier, when he was saying that one of the things that we - or a network like this - could be doing, is looking at standards. There’s abolition, and we should also perhaps look at that - but there’s also standards...

BOB - Part of the motion that we are putting to Shell at their agm on Wednesday is saying that standards of workers rights, and safety and environmental standards should be the same in different countries. They are saying that this is impossible. You know how Shell’s patterned - they have a Shell Petroleum Development Corporation in Nigeria and another one somewhere else and so on, and each company they always claim is autonomous to some extent.

HELEN - So does each company including Shell Nigeria have its own document like that with Health and Safety and Environmental costs?

BOB - Well, this glossy Health, Safety and Environment report goes out from HQ, and the individual operating companies are responsible for producing their own internal reports on these issues.

HELEN - It would be very interesting to collect them together. I would love to see some study on standards in different countries - and some of that would be legal work, some would be work looking at levels of environmental pollution that are regarded by WHO, or someone, as acceptable - and going right through.

BOB - All the various safety codes, and all the other international codes that exist, that people sign up to and don’t observe, are quoted in this report. But that’s the thing - how do you regulate, when the whole balance is against you?

JULIET - Have you had any companies that have a very positive reaction to ECCR, and say, “we like the proposals that you’re putting forward”?

FARAH - It goes against the principle of big business, doesn’t it?
BOB - You get companies like ICI and Shell who like to be seen, who like to feel that they’re market leaders in global responsibility. And so they will say, “well, yes, this is where we’d like to be, and what we aspire to, and what we’re working on”, and so on.

JULIET - And so - what are their reasons for not making this their - putting this into their rule book?

BOB - Well, they quite frankly say that they can’t. And if you push them, they say, well, Shell’s just produced their new Principles of Global Responsibility themselves - and that comes out of these sort of arguments.

JULIET - Yes, it’s effectively a non-binding code - it’s a wish list.

JANE - It strikes me that the people who could enforce it are people on the ground, if only they had the information and the understanding to - it’s the lawyer’s point, who was speaking earlier. It seems to me that if you had a situation where there’s not only all these conventions and statutes and agreements, and all the rest of it, with a binding principle - if you actually had a sort of, “we are a community, we fought for these conditions, and we believe in it - that we will go to the next region and tell them - look, these are the options - this company’s approaching you. You bring it in - we’ll tell what it’s going to be like, we’ll tell you what the pitfalls are”...

But maybe that’s something where the industrialised world could actually inject some cash into getting people together, because it’s only when you hear it from people who live in a similar context to you, that you’re going to, perhaps, listen.

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