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Even if you are only applying for a labouring job, you usually have to fill in a four page application form to get onto an oil rig. When you're through, the personnel department will know a lot about you. When you arrive on your first rig, someone will tell you about Mr Million. *He started off plumbing in Canada, took his chance, kept his nose clean, worked his ass off, and now he's the .... President of Gedce Oil.
This is the golden carrot dangled far in front of your eyes and kept alive in the oil magazines. Forgotten is the fact that this plumber rose in the early boom days before the monopolies sewed up the field and that he was just one person - among tens of thousands of rig workers who never made it.
On the rig, the shift is a continuous twelve hours often in a fierce wind and on rainy decks not designed to shield workers from the weather. When it finishes, you are literally exhausted. Under autocratic supervision and with по counter-weight in your own organisation, as an individual worker you feel alone to the point of dehumanisation.
This is the material basis of another myth of the oil business - the selfreliant individualist. Pitted alone against the elements, you can at least perserve self-respect and dignity by saying "I chose it, 1 can handle it', even if this means ignoring the unemployment and falling living standards which drove you to sea.
The higher wages, longer shore leave and greater security and status of the semi-skilled and promoted workers are always there as a carrot — not to mention Mr Million. And there are always those below you: on many rigs immigrant workers spend months at a stretch as stewards with rock-bottom status. very long hours and no security at all.
The presence of a few highly paid jobs is used to boost productivity and stifle discontent. Although the best jobs are generally 'kept in the family' of management and skilled American permanent employees, a few workers actually succeed in securing promotion to a semi-skilled job despite the strict demarcation sustained by management.
They usually fit into jobs in places unpopular with the Americans like Algeria and the Gulf regions. For most unskilled workers — even those undergoing year long training courses on low -the "big money' on which they wages set their sights remains an illusion conjured up on a distant horizon.
UNIONISATION
To date, trade unions have not taken roots on the oil rigs. The North Sea is like a different world from mainland Britain with its eleven million trade union members. On the rigs. workers are isolated from their normal surroundings: even if they come from a strong trade union background, their isolation cuts them off from their origins.
The nature of the work attracts many people- like ex-servicemen - who have long been uprooted from working class struggle and culture, and have al-
ready adapted to an environment in which they have no control and a rigid hierarchy provides food, bedding and pay, and dispenses orders.
Many rig workers are young and unskilled, frustrated by unemployment or dead-end jobs onshore, hoping to sweat their way up to the Big money' on the rigs. For others it is a last resort in their attempt to provide a living wage for their dependents after being made redundant in the declining engineering sector: many of them, under heavy media influence, blame the unions which never defended their jobs for their redundancies.
So in addition to isolation from workers on shore and on other rigs. a strong current of anti-union feeling stands in the way of organising the workforce. A consequence of all this. which serves as a further obstruction, is
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the searcity of examples of effective union organisation anywhere in the North Sea.
Given such a, favourable situation from their viewpoint, management in most cases adopt an open hostility to trade unions and exploit their absence to the full. The appalling conditions of work and inadequate wages, over which even middle-management has been known to (melfectively) sympathise, produce a high turnover of labour, in turn reinforeing the disorganisation of the workers.
The trade union Teadership and their co-ordinating body, the Aberdeen-based Oil Action Committee, faced admittedly with a very hard task, have been ineffectual and spasmodic in their activities. They have failed to initiate even the most rudimentary information network between the rigs or to make their facilities available for the production of a paper for rig workers.
Such trade union activity as has got underway has centred around platforms rather than rigs. While rigs perform an essentially exploratory role, move from site to site, and have a high turnover of personnel, platforms are moved to an oil field when serious exploitation is to begin and are likely to remain there for up to twenty years. They require more industrially skilled (and, therefore, gencrally unionised workers) and offer better accommodation and conditions. As the rate of oil fow from the North Sea increases, and the number of platforms grows, so too does the possibility of using them as a base to extend trade union activity to the rigs.
SECRECY Recently. Total Oil made a very good oil find in the North Sea. They made a routine announcement that was hardly reported in the press and quietly scaled up the well. The oil field won't be touched until the state of the market and a lull in Total's exploitation programme guarantee them the maximum profit.
This might be five years and it might be twenty. When the Occidental oil company opened their new Aberdeen offices, a senior management official discreetly let it be known that they planned to be there for 50 years!
According to a recent paper by Peter Odell and Kenneth Rosing of the Economic Geography Institute at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Total Oil's ac tions are not untypical. The deciaration of a field's recoverable reserves. they conclude, this very firmly related to the level of investment that the company are prepared to put into the field. It is essentially the investment decision which
determines the quantum of the oil that is recoverable from a field and thus reserves figures change as investment decisions are made (Odell and Rosing, Optimal Development of the North Sea's Oil Fields"). This explains how the reserves on the BP Forties field increased' from 400,000 to 500,000 barrels per day overnight!
Ever since it all started with North Sea Gas* the exploration and exploitation of the North Sea have been shrouded in secrecy; the oil companies have instituted a tirm control of intor mation and consistentiv estimated reserves to suit their convenience and their interests, In fact, thanks to Philip Agee, we probably know more today about the inner workings of the CIA than we do about the oil firms. Uncertainty about the potential of any oil field, and hence about the likely duration of their jobs, is an added burden that workers on the oil rigs could well do without. The oil companies' rigid control of information also adds to the difficulty of unionising
and organising the rigs.
The demand for an end to commercial secrecy and the opening of the oil companies" researches, policy decisions, and accounts to the workforce must consc quently occupy a central position in a socialist policy on oil.
The SLP has already adopted a reso- Tution from Aberdeen calling for a campaign to unionise all oil-related industry. At the same time as discussing our what further demands must be incorporated into its oil and energy policy, it is necessary to go our now and start to implement this decision. As a first step, discussions are underway in Aberdeen as to how best, in collaboration with all other interested parties, a newspaper can be set up to permit the exchange of information and experience necessary to carry out such a fight.
CARL MAIN DAVID EDMONDS