Uncertainty and powerlessness. Grangemouth workers speak

“Uncertainty” said Dr Ewan Gibbs, was a repeated theme. “Dealing with uncertainty was extremely difficult for these workers and their colleagues. Several of them described knowing people who were going through sleepless nights and really being unsure what their future was going to look like.”

There was also, he said,  a frequent sense of powerlessness, “because these decisions were not being made with the involvement of workers.”

Grangemouth (Image: PA)

 “Clearly what’s happened at Grangemouth," Dr Gibbs said, "is that the  two large, multi-national enterprises that combine into Petroineos, are making the crucial decisions. The Just Transition planning framework as it exists at the moment was not able to deal with that in the way that was hoped for. ”

The report quotes workers' feelings about both the restructuring that took place in 2020 following closure of parts of the refinery, and the announcement of full refinery closure in November last year.

The 2020 restructure, the report observes, was accompanied by plans for investment in hydrogen production and carbon capture and storage known as “Grangemouth Renaissance” as well as proposals for a new energy plant.

Given this promise, some saw the news of the abrupt closure as a betrayal.

“INEOS had promised they were going to invest a billion into a new biorefinery," said one worker. "They said they were going to build a new power station and they’d said they were going to spend all this money and this was going to be the new green future of Scotland. We were actually swayed by some of the managers not to leave. We were told not to leave and not to go to other companies like Mossmorran or not to go offshore because this was where the workforce would be needed.”

Ewan Gibbs speaking to the Just Transition Commission (Image: Chris Watt Photography)

Another worker recalled. “We were being told, as our manager at the time said, it is not if, it is when [the closure will take place]. I have absolutely no idea who made this decision. It just seems ludicrous.”

“We get told one thing,” said another, “and then we get told something completely contradictory by the line managers and then different managers tell us different thing.”

Workers in other parts of the site, including the chemical plant, have also felt the impact. One worker observed that “I don’t think there’s a safe job out there. I don’t think anybody feels that they’re in a safe job.”

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The impact of the change, however, was observed to be different for different age groups. One worker said: “You see the older generation who were maybe going to be retiring in two, three, four, five years’ time, that they’re not as alarmed, but the younger generation are alarmed. People have just bought houses, have mortgages, they’re just wondering what to do now.”

One of the main frustrations among workers, Riyoko Shibe observed, was that they weren’t getting a say. Shibe also noted that many of the interviews stressed the importance of “the locality”; of the Grangemouth area itself.

“What a lot of people talked about,"  Shibe said, " was the importance of retaining local employment. Many workers emphasised the skills in Grangemouth and the history of employment in the town and the fact that if you moved to renewables that skillbase would be lost in the time frame that are being set out. If we have renewables in five years, that five years of people unemployed.”

That sentiment, Shibe noted, was best summed up by the quote from one worker, who said: “We’ve got a community that has been built around this site, we’ve got skills and we’ve got people that work there. We’ve got the infrastructure. Why should we not have these jobs when the time has come to move to these industries? Why can we not have it at Grangemouth?”

Another worker voiced fears for how the area might be impacted by job loss: “If you go up to the Moray coast I think for a period of time, the generation maybe just beyond mine was all going into the oil industry and managed to sustain that way. But that’s all going now, I would say. If not completely gone, it’s certainly depleting, and then you’re left with places which are, like, really, really struggling.”

The threat to workers at Grangemouth also comes in a wider context of workers leaving the North Sea sector in large numbers over the last ten years, and, as Dr Gibbs pointed out, workers have already left Grangemouth itself since the industrial relations crisis of 2013.

“I think,” he said, “there’s a real concern that rather than these skills being transitioned over the renewables sector within Scotland, they will simply leave the country.”

It’s not, as the Keep Grangemouth Working campaign by Unite has emphasised,  that workers don’t want to be part of the transition. They very much do - and they have the important skills necessary for it. But the danger is that in the gap between refinery closure and establishment of the new energy industries those workers will go elsewhere. 

He noted that there was a strong sense amongst the workers he talked to that they had skills that were highly relevant to renewables. "The workers that I spoke to, especially the younger ones, expected to live through, within their working lives , a transition. They don’t expect to remain within carbon intensive fossil fuel industries throughout their career and are quite prepared to go through transition.”

This view was summed-up by one worker who said: “When you talk about 2040, you talk about 2050, these targets for net zero, I realise that that is going to be within my working career. These transitions they're talking about, they're talking about me. They're talking about my career and my future and obviously some of my colleagues.”