GMB Scotland warns rushed rundown of oil and gas threatens industrial calamity

The rushed rundown of North Sea drilling threatens the same economic devastation as the closure of Britain’s mines 40 years ago, according to GMB Scotland.

The union, one of the biggest across energy, fears oil and gas workers and their families are being abandoned like the pit communities brought to their knees in the 1980s.

Between 1980 and 1994, more than 200,000 miners lost their jobs in the UK as almost 200 pits shuttered inflicting decades of economic pain.

Oil and gas supports up to 120,000 UK jobs and Louise Gilmour, GMB Scotland secretary, accuses ministers of failing to learn the lessons of the 1980s while sleepwalking into another industrial catastrophe.

She said: “All the promises of new jobs being made to oil and gas workers today are the same promises made to miners 40 years ago.

“They meant nothing then and, without urgent action, will mean nothing now.

“A needless, industrial calamity is unfolding right now, today, while ministers talk about jobs tomorrow.

“The voice of energy workers must be heard and heeded instead of empty words and hollow promises.”

GMB, one of the biggest unions across the energy sector, is urging chancellor Rachel Reeves to cut the windfall tax offshore in next week’s budget to reassure the industry and slow job losses.

The union is also urging the UK government to greenlight the Rosebank field north of Shetland and Holyrood ministers to end their ideological opposition to new nuclear energy.

Gilmour highlighted research from Robert Gordon University warning of 200 oil and gas jobs being lost every week for five years without urgent action and called for an industrial strategy to protect jobs and energy security during the transition to clean power.

She said: “The need to safeguard this crucial sector could not be more obvious or urgent.

“We will need oil and gas for years as we transition to renewables and we will need the skills and experience of oil and gas workers to make that transition happen.

“The need for an industrial strategy driven by ambition and investment that can build on those skills could not be more urgent.

“We must remember our industrial history or be condemned to repate it."                                                                                                                               

Gilmour has written to the chancellor warning the Energy Profits Levy must be reduced to offer urgent reassurance to an uncertain industry “undermined by years of mixed messages.”

She warned the UK Government’s rush to renewables was sacrificing oil and gas workers whose skills and experience would be crucial to deliver a “measured, planned and successful transition.”

The colliery closures in the decade after the strike in 1984 were blamed for shattering mining communities and inflicting generations of economic misery.

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies exposed a catastrophic impact on miners made redundant with wages falling by 40 per cent in the first years after pits closed and remaining 20% down after 15 years.

It said: “Most studies on the socioeconomic impact of the closures on the displaced miners conclude there are few, if any, more striking examples of chronic job loss in Western Europe.”

 

‘I’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE…AND IT BREAKS MY HEART’
Former miner fears rushed transition to renewables risks another industrial catastrophe

By John Channon,

When I started at Seafield, 2200 men worked there. It’s just houses now. 

The coal seams went away out under the bed of the Forth and there were millions of tons down there, enough for 150 years, we were told. Well, if there was, it’s still there. It’s everything else that’s gone. 

There were pits all across Fife and every one shutting down was like a nuclear bomb going off, waves of destruction. The miners went first then the suppliers, firms doing the steel, wood, pumps, transformers, everything we needed. Then everyone else went, the laundrettes, burger vans, newsagents, garages, cafes. Some go quickly, others slowly but they all go. 

When you close a pit or a power station, an oil rig or an engineering yard, these places don’t just lose the jobs and the wages, they lose their purpose, their pride. Whole communities were left on their knees. A lot of them never got up again. 

I was out 13 months during the strike in 1984. I remember picketing Hunterston when soldiers from England were dressed up as policemen and some of the real police ended up trying to protect us from their own side.

Margaret Thatcher’s government was waging a war and we were the enemy. When she died, some of the old boys went out and gathered where the pit used to be, just to remember. 

Seafield stayed open for a bit but finally shut in 1988, the towers came down the next year and that was it. You get redundancy money but that doesn’t last and then what? I was one of the lucky ones. I had coalface training and knew how to dig.

 I ended up going down south for work, started on the Channel Tunnel, then came back to Scotland on contract work, ended up in gas, became a team leader, a GMB Scotland rep, and am still there today. 

So I know plenty about energy transitions and the lies that get told. When the pits shut, they said it was for the greater good, for progress, but there was no progress, just carnage. They took away the jobs and took away the hope. Villages were gutted, families scattered. Villages got turned off like a light switch. 

All the talk now about a just transition from oil and gas to green energy is like hearing an old record. The same big, broken promises. Years ago, I remember asking why turbines for a wind farm off Scotland were being built on the other side of the world? You could stand in empty engineering yards in Fife and see them all, standing out at sea, and not one of them built here.

We’re still asking now, still waiting for an answer and the turbines are still getting sailed around the world to Scotland.

Why are we not building them ourselves — in our own yards, with our own hands — creating apprenticeships, jobs, good wages? Instead, we sent it all abroad and called it progress. It’s not what I’d call it.

This doesn’t feel like history repeating itself, it is history repeating itself. We had the skills, the machinery, the know-how, but instead of investing in our people, we gave it all away. And we still are.

The polticians, who couldn’t deliver, the multinationals, who didn’t invest when they could have, there is plenty of blame to go around but, like always, it will be the workers and their families and their communities that end up paying the price.

They call it transition but it feels like abandonment. I’m 66 now and have seen this movie before. It breaks my heart to have to watch it again.

 John Channon is a former miner now GMB Scotland rep in gas distribution

  ENDS