The Teesside Construction Committee will target projects that have a low proportion of local labour.
Resentment has been fuelled by the construction of a new waste-to-energy plant near Redcar, which is alleged to have not given local workers a fair opportunity to work on the site.
The incinerator is part of a £250m project to build a waste handling site in Kirby and an incinerator in Teesside to support a 30-year waste management contract worth £1.2bn by the Merseyside Recycling and Waste Authority. The contractor is French company Sita in a consortium with Sembcorp of Singapore.
Sita held a jobs fair in the area last week to recruit 100 of the 400 workers it needs to complete construction and then operate the facility. Of these, 50 would be construction jobs and 50 to help run the finished site.
Michael Blench, regional officer for the GMB union, said "Sita is not playing fair by the Teesside workforce. SITA has discriminated against them by giving them no chance to get up to three quarters of the 400 jobs on the site at the construction phase of the job. Teesside has the highest unemployment rate in the country, and the skilled local unemployed labour force had high expectations of employment on the Sita project, from the very start of this project.”
.png)
He continued: “Sita by their own admittance have made it clear that local labour was not a consideration when tenders for contacts on the project were awarded, so essentially SITA are only interest in profit at the cost of local labour.
“Local construction activists are not fooled by management propaganda and empty promises. They have now had enough of these rogue companies overlooking them for work.
“These workers have formed the Teesside Construction Committee to target such projects in the area which exclude them from employment and pay inferior rates of pay to the normal National Collective Agreement rates for such work. These companies instead promote and support the use of Umbrella tax avoidance companies to administer their payroll which relinquishes them from any direct employment of their workforce. This inevitably leads to the exploitation of non-UK posted workers who are brought in to undercut local and UK workers, which is truly a race to the bottom.
"The newly formed Teesside Construction Committee has pledged to take action against this."
Sita Sembcorp UK said at the end of January it had 398 workers on-site, of whom 210 were local and a further 47 were UK residents, suggesting that 141 had been shipped in from overseas.
Got a story? Email news@theconstructionindex.co.uk
