North Sea Transition

We were invited to contribute to a panel on North Sea Transition at the conference ‘Working for Climate Justice: trade unions in the front line against climate change’ at Toynbee Hall in East London on 27^th of October.

Since we launched in the autumn of 2017 Scot.E3’s emphasis has been on building capacity for a worker led transition with a focus on workplace and community organising.   Arguing for the rapid phase out of North Sea Oil and Gas has formed a central part of our campaigning.  The Sea Change report, published in 2019, remains very relevant.  It shows how switching from oil and gas to wind and solar would create a big net increase in jobs in Scotland and failing to make this transition would mean that targets to cut carbon emissions would not be met.

It’s very important that the climate movement has embraced the significance of North Sea oil and gas and a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel industries.  That wasn’t so much the case in 2017.  But two critical and closely linked challenges remain:

• How do we build a mass movement with powerful roots in every workplace and working-class community that pushes for the necessary changes?
• How do we engage workers in the energy sector, who are very aware that change is needed, but have very little confidence that it will be socially just?

For more than fifty years the big oil and gas companies have used their operations in the UK sector of the North Sea to blaze a trail for what we have come to know as neoliberalism; establishing practices that have been copied and taken up internationally.  Outsourcing, multiple layers of subcontracting, anti-union policies and the use of blacklists.  At the same time the so-called free ‘market’ has been featherbedded by massive state subsidies which have exceeded taxation revenue.  

The onshore construction industry has been on the same journey.  In Scotland the Construction Rank and File group has grown a new network through taking the construction industry using direct action tactics, picketing sites, and building combative organisation from the ground up. Just under a year ago two Unite activists, working on the new high voltage transmission lines from the Moray Firth to central Scotland were sacked for their union activity just before Christmas.  However, after the Rank and File group picketed the main subcontractor and Scottish and Southern Energy they were reinstated with full back pay.  The group has been a consistent supporter of Scot.E3 and have very publicly advocated for the importance of building worker organisation to ensure that the energy transition is a just transition.  

Despite many analysts and some industry insiders warning that oil and gas is an increasingly risky investment global levels of investment are high and currently booming while the industry remains determined to squeeze as much oil and gas out as it can out of the North Sea.   Among Westminster’s policy turns there has been a consistent adherence to the North Sea transition deal which describes in broad terms how that it is to be achieved.  The Scottish Government and the offshore trade unions remain signed up to the ‘transition’ deal.  Pursuing this path means that investment in hydrogen and CCS is prioritised at the expense of renewables, condemning UK consumers to a high cost and uncertain future and undermining progress to a genuine energy transition.   There’s no evidence that big oil has any particular commitment to the North Sea, and they must know that hydrogen for domestic heating is hugely problematic, but they are very keen to stick with false solutions that are compatible with the existing infrastructure and networks of fossil capital.

The cost-of-living crisis isn’t over.  However, to date, the climate and workers movements have failed to nail the intimate connection between fuel and food poverty and the oil and gas industry.  Perhaps there’s a lesson here.  At a time when we face a drawn-out existential crisis there is a need for new ways of organising that bring unions and communities together in common understanding and common struggle.  There are some examples of what this might begin to look like. In Scotland Edinburgh Trade Unions in Communities provides an innovative model, while in France social movement trade unionism is having an impact.