Both sides in strike row must take time to reflect

Published on Sunday 27 April 2008 21:34

WITH the shutdown of the BP Forties pipeline threatening serious disruption to oil supplies throughout the UK, the Grangemouth dispute has escalated far beyond a local row about pension rights for a group of refinery workers. Emergency services and tens of thousands of businesses across Scotland and northern England are now vitally dependent on tanker supplies from the continent into Aberdeen and other east coast ports and those supplies being unloaded. As well as the Border Thistle tanker carry

Should these back-up oil supplies be put in jeopardy, government ministers at both Holyrood and Westminster will be faced with a major crisis that will require the national as opposed to sectional interests are put first to ensure basic oil and gas supplies are safeguarded. Members of the Unite trade union have left not just the employer Ineos but the whole of the UK in no doubt as to the depth of feeling over this dispute and their pivotal position in ensuring oil supplies across both Scotland and the UK. Having taken their industrial action and made their point, the union now has to consider long and hard the effect of further strike action both on wider public opinion and the functioning of the UK overall.

Remarks by Phil McNulty of Unite that the union now wants a period of reflection, with no plans for an escalation or new strike, are wise and welcome. Many thousands of people in Scotland are watching this dispute with growing apprehension and alarm. The longer it continues, the greater the temptation to panic-buy and to stockpile for fear of what the future might hold. At the same time the strikers would stand to lose what public sympathy they have for their cause by further action that would bring dislocation on a massive scale.

Indeed, it would be hard for the union to refute the allegation that it has elevated a local dispute with consequences totally out of proportion to the issue of pension rights for new workers yet to join the company. Regard must be shown for the wider public interest. Hospitals, schools, emergency services and millions of workers are vitally dependent on regular, reliable deliveries of fuel. Were these wider interests put at risk by a second bout of industrial action over a change to pension arrangements now commonplace in the private sector, the union would almost certainly risk a widespread public backlash that would do it, and Grangemouth workers, no good whatever.

This is the risk that must now be weighed. The company, for its part, should take Mr McNulty's remarks at face value and offer a further meeting to reopen negotiations and explore ways in which this damaging dispute can be settled. The next few days will prove pivotal in preventing this dispute escalating into a full-scale national crisis, one in which no-one wins.