Striking workers learn to think green

Staff at the Vestas wind turbine plant realise the environmental benefits of their job are just as important as employment figures

Gregor Gall
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 July 2009 19.04 BST

About 25 wind turbine workers have occupied their plant on the Isle of Wight – the Vestas Wind Systems factory in Newport – in protest at its imminent closure.
While the industrial action is news in itself, the real story is the madness of closing the only wind turbine manufacturing plant in Britain when the government is committed to generating more green energy. Only last week, Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary, announced targets for the generation of green and renewable energy.
The workers occupying the Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight pointed out this obvious inconsistency in letting the private owner flout government policy. So too has the workers' union, Unite.
Vestas claims that the manufacturing operation is insufficiently profitable – even though its profits continue to grow – and that it exists in too complex a planning environment. Furthermore, it has been cutting back on its wind turbine activities in Britain for some time. In late 2008, it signalled its pullout from its Scottish operation.
So the importance of the occupation is not just about action to save jobs at a time when unemployment is continuing to rise steeply. Rather, it is about the necessity to save jobs which are critical to the wider good for society. These jobs could be about delivering vital public services as firefighters do. But, in this case, the issue of the public good is the protection of our environment.
Six hundred workers' jobs are under threat on an island where employment is difficult to find. In understanding why the occupation arose, the agitation of the Campaign against Climate Change seems to have played a role in bolstering the workers' understanding of fighting not just to save their jobs but also to make a stand for the environment. But they also seem to have learned that previous protest outside the plant was not sufficient.
That's why the occupiers have set up their own website and organised a series of demonstrations. Protests are due to take place in London and the Isle of Wight in order to support the occupation.
The real battle is now on as the occupying workers claim they have been threatened with the sack unless they leave the plant and that police have tried to stop supplies of food getting into the plant. To stay in occupation means balancing the fight to save their jobs with the threat of losing their redundancy packages.
But it will also mean the need to strengthen the alliance between workers and environmentalists. Unions have often supported expansion of airports (such as the T4 Heathrow terminal) and the continuation of nuclear power on the basis that these create jobs in spite of their environmental costs. So enlarging and deepening such an alliance is not going to be without problems. But it may become easier when the union movement comes to see that the clear determination of environmentalists allows them to take direct action when political lobbying on its own returns slow and sparse results.