‘We are extremely delighted,’ says Howard Rooms. ‘We have been working for a long time to get nuclear back on the agenda. We are more than delighted’.
Howard Rooms is a trade unionist from BNFL’s controversial plant at Sellafield who has spent twenty five year fighting for the nuclear industry. He is the coordinator for the Nuclear Workers Campaign or nUKlear 21 that represents workers from Dounreay in Scotland to Dungeness in Kent. It has members from the five trade unions that have nuclear workers: AMICUS, GMB, PROSPECT, T&G and UCATT.
Not always popular, Rooms reckons his campaign group are the Millwall supporters of the energy business: no one likes them, but they don’t care. And this week, after years of behind the scenes lobbying, nuclear workers got the goal they wanted: the green light for a generation of new nuclear power plants.
On Wednesday, the day after Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling gave nuclear the go ahead, a jubilant Howard Rooms was at Westminster to meet Blair and Darling and to hand in a petition signed by 10,000 nuclear workers. Speaking before the visit, the veteran trade unionist let slip what he would say to Blair. I will ‘thank him for meeting with us and impress on him the need for a fair and balanced energy policy for the UK including nuclear.’
He added that he would be telling the Prime Minster that there are several sites around the UK that ‘are more than willing’ to support ‘the nuclear renaissance.’
Rooms outlines the strategy that nUKlear 21 has waged to get nuclear power back on the agenda. He says that ‘going back years and years we set out to influence our own unions. Their campaign had been ‘pretty successful to get nuclear accepted’ as part of an energy mix.
Indeed, nUKlear 21’s predecessor was the National Campaign for the Nuclear Industry (NCNI) that was launched in the mid-eighties. By 1990, BNFL was praising the ‘unsung heroes’ of the NCNI, who were putting in ‘a tremendous amount of time and energy into lobbying at party and trade union conferences over the past several years’. One BNFL source said at the time: ‘There’s no question in our minds that they have performed a very significant role in modifying the attitudes of their fellow trade unionists outside the nuclear industry’.
By the year 2000, nuclear’s future was politically dead but climate change was beginning to climb up the political agenda. So in 2001 the NCNI changed its name to nUKlear 21, to reflect ‘our new approach to our campaigning from merely defending civil nuclear power to promoting it as an environmentally friendly non-global warming energy source for the 21st century’.
They have taken this message to the political parties. ‘We have tended to lobby party conferences and fringe meetings and get ourselves down to Westminster, talking to MPs,’ says Rooms. With the unions won over, the next stage was to get the backing of key local constituency MPs who could then ‘spread the message through the political parties’. Working closely with nUKlear 21 have been John Robertson, the chair of the All-Party Group on Nuclear Energy, and Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland who is an ex-press spokesperson for BNFL.
The strategy was clever. Instead of the sinister nuclear lobby you had workers and MPs fighting for jobs. Earlier this year, BNFL current Corporate Affairs Director, Philip Dewhurst admitted to the trade journal PR Week that BNFL was spreading its message ‘via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats’. Soon after it was revealed that BNFL was funding the expenses of nUKlear 21.
Howard Rooms maintains the campaign is supported ‘purely from our own funding’. However, he concedes that the nuclear companies ‘have always had a pretty good relationship with the trade unions and afforded us full time facilities, including access to computers and office equipment.’
Rooms admits that as well as paying his wages, BNFL pays for his ‘expenses as part of the arrangements we have with the company. But they pay for that kind of arrangement what ever we are doing We don’t see it as taking money off the company. The company don’t have any say on what we do or how we spend our time. We have a free-reign’.
BNFL has confirmed the relationship, arguing that trade union representatives ‘have a legitimate role in promoting and defending employment in the nuclear industry’. The company admits that trade union ‘representatives are paid by the Company when on these duties’. It adds that ‘travel and business expenses are reimbursed’ and administrative support facilities such communications systems and general office facilities are also provided. But BNFL declines to offer how much it pays.
The industry’s critics are worried that unionists are taking money from the industry. Martin Forwood is the Campaign Coordinator for Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment. He says that the ‘unions current promotion of new nukes, paid for largely by their company’ is similar to the one ‘they undertook in the early 1990’s’ to fight for the THORP reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Then the workers’ campaign which was under the banner of ‘Trust Us’ was again partly funded by BNFL says Forwood. ‘It involved whistle-stop tours of all major UK towns and cities and even included work in Europe’.
‘BNFL realized that as a company they were so disliked that they going to be hard pushed to get things through, but if they used the ‘nice work-force’, if all of this came from the workers themselves, they stood a much better chance gaining public approval for any major new projects.’
He believes that ‘the workers have been used by the company in that respect. From our point of view I would rather see the workers actually working and making sure the plant is safe rather than doing the company’s business’.
There are also critics from unions whose members are part of nUKlear 21. Ronnie Waugh sits on the National Executive of the GMB union. Speaking personally he is highly critical of nUKlear 21. ‘They are not being open in the union in terms of how they are so close to their employer’, he says. Despite this, there appears to be ‘big time’ lobbying going on within the union on behalf of the nuclear industry. ‘It appears the tail is wagging the dog,’ he says.
Waugh says he is against ‘any trade union being beholden to an employer for any purpose. It is something a trade union would never do, take money off the employer, apart from being paid obviously but in terms of campaigning. You never compromise your principles by taking money off the employer.’ He says that if you ‘take the employers shilling you have been compromised’.
Other trade unionists worry too. John Aitkin is the chair of ‘Region One’ of the T&G Union London and South East region. ‘Unions are independent’ he says.‘The T&G is an independent union, so is the GMB. We are opposed to sweet-heart deals of any shape or form. We just should not get in bed with the nuclear agencies’.
‘Transparency is the key’ adds Simon Webley from the Institute of Business Ethics. ‘If you are being paid either expenses or fees or doing something on behalf of a company, then that should be made public by the company as well as the individuals.’
Transparency should mean that both BNFL and nUKlear 21 are more open about their financial relationship. Howard Rooms stands firm: ‘We will take money from wherever we can get it,’ he says. ‘We are trying to run a campaign in defence of an industry, in defence of jobs, like other industries have done in the past, like the miners did, like the car workers do. We will do what ever it takes to defend our livelihood and our industry’.
A version of this article also appeared in the Guardian
‘We are extremely delighted,’ says Howard Rooms. ‘We have been working for a long time to get nuclear back on the agenda. We are more than delighted’.
Howard Rooms is a trade unionist from BNFL’s controversial plant at Sellafield who has spent twenty five year fighting for the nuclear industry. He is the coordinator for the Nuclear Workers Campaign or nUKlear 21 that represents workers from Dounreay in Scotland to Dungeness in Kent. It has members from the five trade unions that have nuclear workers: AMICUS, GMB, PROSPECT, T&G and UCATT.
Not always popular, Rooms reckons his campaign group are the Millwall supporters of the energy business: no one likes them, but they don’t care. And this week, after years of behind the scenes lobbying, nuclear workers got the goal they wanted: the green light for a generation of new nuclear power plants.
On Wednesday, the day after Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling gave nuclear the go ahead, a jubilant Howard Rooms was at Westminster to meet Blair and Darling and to hand in a petition signed by 10,000 nuclear workers. Speaking before the visit, the veteran trade unionist let slip what he would say to Blair. I will ‘thank him for meeting with us and impress on him the need for a fair and balanced energy policy for the UK including nuclear.’
He added that he would be telling the Prime Minster that there are several sites around the UK that ‘are more than willing’ to support ‘the nuclear renaissance.’
Rooms outlines the strategy that nUKlear 21 has waged to get nuclear power back on the agenda. He says that ‘going back years and years we set out to influence our own unions. Their campaign had been ‘pretty successful to get nuclear accepted’ as part of an energy mix.
Indeed, nUKlear 21’s predecessor was the National Campaign for the Nuclear Industry (NCNI) that was launched in the mid-eighties. By 1990, BNFL was praising the ‘unsung heroes’ of the NCNI, who were putting in ‘a tremendous amount of time and energy into lobbying at party and trade union conferences over the past several years’. One BNFL source said at the time: ‘There’s no question in our minds that they have performed a very significant role in modifying the attitudes of their fellow trade unionists outside the nuclear industry’.
By the year 2000, nuclear’s future was politically dead but climate change was beginning to climb up the political agenda. So in 2001 the NCNI changed its name to nUKlear 21, to reflect ‘our new approach to our campaigning from merely defending civil nuclear power to promoting it as an environmentally friendly non-global warming energy source for the 21st century’.
They have taken this message to the political parties. ‘We have tended to lobby party conferences and fringe meetings and get ourselves down to Westminster, talking to MPs,’ says Rooms. With the unions won over, the next stage was to get the backing of key local constituency MPs who could then ‘spread the message through the political parties’. Working closely with nUKlear 21 have been John Robertson, the chair of the All-Party Group on Nuclear Energy, and Jamie Reed, the MP for Copeland who is an ex-press spokesperson for BNFL.
The strategy was clever. Instead of the sinister nuclear lobby you had workers and MPs fighting for jobs. Earlier this year, BNFL current Corporate Affairs Director, Philip Dewhurst admitted to the trade journal PR Week that BNFL was spreading its message ‘via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats’. Soon after it was revealed that BNFL was funding the expenses of nUKlear 21.
Howard Rooms maintains the campaign is supported ‘purely from our own funding’. However, he concedes that the nuclear companies ‘have always had a pretty good relationship with the trade unions and afforded us full time facilities, including access to computers and office equipment.’
Rooms admits that as well as paying his wages, BNFL pays for his ‘expenses as part of the arrangements we have with the company. But they pay for that kind of arrangement what ever we are doing We don’t see it as taking money off the company. The company don’t have any say on what we do or how we spend our time. We have a free-reign’.
BNFL has confirmed the relationship, arguing that trade union representatives ‘have a legitimate role in promoting and defending employment in the nuclear industry’. The company admits that trade union ‘representatives are paid by the Company when on these duties’. It adds that ‘travel and business expenses are reimbursed’ and administrative support facilities such communications systems and general office facilities are also provided. But BNFL declines to offer how much it pays.
The industry’s critics are worried that unionists are taking money from the industry. Martin Forwood is the Campaign Coordinator for Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment. He says that the ‘unions current promotion of new nukes, paid for largely by their company’ is similar to the one ‘they undertook in the early 1990’s’ to fight for the THORP reprocessing plant at Sellafield. Then the workers’ campaign which was under the banner of ‘Trust Us’ was again partly funded by BNFL says Forwood. ‘It involved whistle-stop tours of all major UK towns and cities and even included work in Europe’.
‘BNFL realized that as a company they were so disliked that they going to be hard pushed to get things through, but if they used the ‘nice work-force’, if all of this came from the workers themselves, they stood a much better chance gaining public approval for any major new projects.’
He believes that ‘the workers have been used by the company in that respect. From our point of view I would rather see the workers actually working and making sure the plant is safe rather than doing the company’s business’.
There are also critics from unions whose members are part of nUKlear 21. Ronnie Waugh sits on the National Executive of the GMB union. Speaking personally he is highly critical of nUKlear 21. ‘They are not being open in the union in terms of how they are so close to their employer’, he says. Despite this, there appears to be ‘big time’ lobbying going on within the union on behalf of the nuclear industry. ‘It appears the tail is wagging the dog,’ he says.
Waugh says he is against ‘any trade union being beholden to an employer for any purpose. It is something a trade union would never do, take money off the employer, apart from being paid obviously but in terms of campaigning. You never compromise your principles by taking money off the employer.’ He says that if you ‘take the employers shilling you have been compromised’.
Other trade unionists worry too. John Aitkin is the chair of ‘Region One’ of the T&G Union London and South East region. ‘Unions are independent’ he says.‘The T&G is an independent union, so is the GMB. We are opposed to sweet-heart deals of any shape or form. We just should not get in bed with the nuclear agencies’.
‘Transparency is the key’ adds Simon Webley from the Institute of Business Ethics. ‘If you are being paid either expenses or fees or doing something on behalf of a company, then that should be made public by the company as well as the individuals.’
Transparency should mean that both BNFL and nUKlear 21 are more open about their financial relationship. Howard Rooms stands firm: ‘We will take money from wherever we can get it,’ he says. ‘We are trying to run a campaign in defence of an industry, in defence of jobs, like other industries have done in the past, like the miners did, like the car workers do. We will do what ever it takes to defend our livelihood and our industry’.
A version of this article also appeared in the Guardian