Well Done Unite ?

[youngmafbog]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ineos-to-close-grangemouth-petrochemical-site-8898856.html

Well now some wont have a job to strike over.

Hope Unite is happy. Just how can they expect a company to just carry on when it is loosing big bucks.

Also smacks of 70's sytle Unions as it started with their conveyor.

All out brothers! Except some will be out more than others.

[Baldric]

I wonder if it's the same Union Officials involved who helped to close the Mines?

[Baldric]

Deja ^^^^ vu!

[Gromit]

The plant is closing because it is badly run by the management and owners.

// The plant is losing £150m a year and needs £300m of investment in new terminal facilities to ship in cheap ethane from the US to replace declining North Sea feedstocks.

They want to close its final salary retirement scheme to address a £200m pension deficit. //

[youngmafbog]

So striking and refusing a package that would allow the plant to run and not loose your job is a good idea then.

To wrongs do not make a right Gromit.

[douglas9401]

We'll reopen the plant if you, the workforce via your union agree to no further industrial action this year.
Okay then, we agree.
Bugger, we never expected that, what now?
Make some noise about massive losses and remember not to mention the £150million we were demanding from Holyrood a few weeks ago. Nobody will remember that, they'll swallow the usual guff about 70s style unions and not realise that it was us actually running the place and we're incompetent

[jake-the-peg]

Depends YMB

If you were approaching retirement losing your final salary pension might be a lot worse than being thown out of work.

You are rather taking Billionaire Jim Ratcliffe at his word that the plant is losing money and that this isn't just a cynical attemt to ramp up profits at the expense of staff who have nowhere else to go.

He refused to open up the books during negotiations to demonstrate that this action was indeed necessary so we'll see.

Sounds to me if we're talking about the 70's that Ratcliffe subscribes to the you-bloody-do-what-I-tell-you school of management that did so much for the industrial relations of the period and gave us the industrial landscape we have today with so many foreign firms running British manufacturing

I dare say TATA or some other foreign conglomerate will buy it and work well and supportively with the workers and you'll be on blaming Unions for the fact that British industry is in foreign hands

[modeller]

The Union knows best they tell us so why not give it to them to run as a workers co-operative. It will then become as successful as all the other
co-ops and management buy outs of the Scargill days.
Is he still living in the grace and favour house financed by the NUM or have they finally pulled the plug on that perk.

[hawksley]

Douglas9401, You are so right.

[mikey4444]

Complete b0llox YMB. Read the facts of this case. Even if the staff offered to work for free, it still wouldn't have saved this plant. Rotten Management, by a rotten Boss.

[modeller]

//He refused to open up the books during negotiations to demonstrate that this action was indeed necessary so we'll see.//
Companies don't open their books to possible competitors , nor to would be buyers until its opportune to do so, . Initially the company is valued on the stock exchange.

[modeller]

We don't know the full details but the unions have destroyed companies in the past. I can remember cases where workers and management worked out a scheme of work that increased the pay of the workers ,saved the
company and all the jobs. but the union said no and the company folded.

[doctordb]

The union is now prepared to accept the company's proposal's. Probably too late, another hand of poker they have blown. However, it won't affect the 'fat cat' union bosses like it will their 'salary-paying' members.

[237SJ]

It`s all about politics - both sides are playing a game of bringkmanship and the workers are the pawns in the middle.

[237SJ]

*brinkmanship*

[Gromit]

// They want to close its final salary retirement scheme to address a £200m pension deficit. //

That probably means the company had previously agreed to match workers' payments to the fund and has not done. Or worse still, they had done a 'Maxwell' and stole the pension money.
Either way, the pension fund has been plundered, and the workers are supposed to "trust" management.

Don't think so.

[doctordb]

They may not be 'workers' any longer gromit. Can they trust the union either?

[Hypognosis]

APD - A Pension Deficit disorder?

How did they manage to get their scheme £150 million in deficit? Was the employer taking a (Government approved?) 'pension holiday'? Or have they made some investments that went sour?

What was that about Holyrood, by the way? Corporate Welfare payout time again, was it?

[Wharton]

Scotland is the only country in the world to have discovered oil and then become poorer. Now it's got a petro-chemical company which makes a loss. I can smell something here.