 | Grangemouth/Forties Update: Forties pipeline remains shut down (Thread 2) | The Oil Drum | Forties - Grangemouth: the failure of a complex tightly coupled system |  |
| Grangemouth/Forties Update: Forties pipeline remains shut down (Thread 2) | The Oil Drum: Europe | Forties - Grangemouth: the failure of a complex tightly coupled system | |
20 comments on Grangemouth strike: Anglo Disease in action?
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20 comments on Grangemouth strike: Anglo Disease in action?
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Jerome,
i didn't realise that UBS, Credit Suisse, Soc Gen, BNP, DZ, Deutsche Bank, Mitsubishi are Anglo companies:-)
Interesting that every time Ineos acquires a new business, 10% of the equity is offered up for sale to employees.
Last week Ineos offered to suspend all changes to all pensions for all existing staff at the Grangemouth site, pending an independent appraisal of their pension scheme. The strike is now about non-existent workers.
From the T&G union website:
Q. Why is this proposal unacceptable to the union?
A. The company can afford to continue this scheme. Since the scheme opened, despite dropping contributions, the surplus of the scheme has grown. It is funded now at 120%. There is no question to us that this scheme can afford to sustain the current and new members.
Not that I want to agree with Ineos management, but it stands to reason that in a sunset industry like North Sea oil and gas, it's structurally impossible to ensure lifetime job security and fat pensions to new hires.
I explained the origins of the "Anglo Disease" term in one of the stories posted in the link near the top of this story. I think it's quite fair to say that finance is predominantly centered around the City of London and Wall Street, and the the underlying ideology of financial capitalism is pushed hardest out of these two countries, for that very reason.
As to Ineos, they gave up at the last minute on their attempt to change the existing pensions scheme for current workers (but probably too late), but not on their proposal for future workers. Given that pensions are an indirect portion of workers' pay in the UK system, this is just a way to lower wages for future hires and cut more "fat." I don't think it's unreasonable for unions to fight for the rights of workers that will be alongside them in the future (create two categories and see how one, the costlier one, gets eliminated as quickly as possible and replaced by the other).