Unite union seeks British jobs pledge from Westinghouse nuclear consortium

Call for assurances when Westinghouse and Shaw Group meet Mandelson over nuclear reactor contract

Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 January 2010 16.43 GMT

Unions are pressing government ministers to extract guarantees on British jobs from the Westinghouse-led consortium, which wants to build more than £10bn of new nuclear reactors in Britain.
A joint delegation from Westinghouse and Shaw Group, the controversial US group recently appointed as lead contractor for the work, will fly to London next month to meet ministers from Lord Mandelson's business department and Ed Miliband's energy department.
The companies have promised that "up to 80%" of the contracts to supply reactor components will go to British companies.
But Dougie Rooney, national officer for energy from the union Unite, said that the ministers should hold the companies, which require government approval to build the reactors, to their promise on British jobs. "It's one thing to say it, it's another thing delivering on that promise," he said. "My concern is that given what has happened in the past and that Westinghouse and Shaw are sitting on a global monopoly to build that type of reactor, we have to have copper-bottomed guarantees about that being realised."
Shaw is best known in the UK as one of the main contractors to build Total's controversial Lindsey refinery and made 51 workers there redundant last year, which led to a series of wildcat walk-outs around the country over the use of foreign labour. There is the potential for 10,000 British manufacturing jobs to be created through the nuclear building programme.
Westinghouse announced that it had appointed Shaw to lead its new build programme in the UK on Christmas Eve. Shaw is partnered by British construction firm Laing O'Rourke, which Westinghouse said is consistent with its "buy where we build" approach to business.
Mike Tynan, chief executive of Westinghouse in Britain, said: "Laing O'Rourke is not only the largest privately owned construction company in the UK, it is also one of the most respected in the global construction industry. The addition of such an experienced UK-based company, and access to its existing UK supplier base, will certainly add value as we build AP1000s in the United Kingdom in a manner that is truly beneficial to all parties."
But Laing O'Rourke will not be involved in providing any of the high-specification reactor components. British-based manufacturers such as BAE Systems and Rolls Royce are understood to be concerned that lucrative contracts to make reactor modules could be lost to Shaw's manufacturing bases in the US and Belgium.
The UK nuclear joint venture formed by E.ON and RWE is expected to decide whether to place a reactor order with Westinghouse or its French rival Areva around Easter, although there is no guarantee that they will do either. It had planned to make an investment decision during the first quarter. The companies are understood to be concerned about the economics of building new reactors, particularly with the low carbon price. They also harbour doubts that the changes in the planning regime proposed by the Conservatives could delay construction should they win the election.