Good news for British workers
The Wall Street Journal reports -
Hundreds of laid-off U.K. workers got their jobs back this week after organizing mass protests at energy plants across the country, coordinated through text messages and social-networking Web sites.The contractor companies at Total SA's 200,000-barrels-a-day Lindsey oil refinery met nearly all the striking workers' demands, which had become a rallying cry of sympathy strikes across the U.K.'s engineering-construction industry.
Back in February, we wrote about the wildcat strikes - Hurray!. They occurred because under EU regulations British workers can lose their jobs to anyone anywhere in the EU who is willing to work for less. Janet Daley explained -
The drafting in of low-wage work gangs has always been seen as unjust: exploitative of the foreign workers, and destructive of the social cohesion of existing communities. . .An individual travelling to seek work, prepared to take his chances in fair competition with local workers is one thing: the organised recruitment of people from the poorest regions of the poorest countries in Europe in order to reduce employers' wage costs in the more prosperous ones, is something else altogether.
That is what had been happening. We're glad to see that in this case it was stopped.
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