In the; dock

Management and the government deny it but workers are convinced that jobs will go at the Rosyth dockyard and that more trouble will follow if the yard's owners are allowed to take over the Faslane naval base It's a gloomy pint of Guinness they serve at the Glayder Inn these days. When the red-brick motel opened in the middle of a Rosyth housing estate in 1993, the public bar would be eight-deep with workers and Royal Navy personnel at the end of a week's work at the naval yard. Last Friday the biggest crowd of drinkers were Welsh rugby fans warming up for a journey to Murrayfield the next day.

"Look around you. This place used to be full up with yard workers, now I can only count the four of us," says Peter, sweeping his arm down the bar to his drinking companions.

None of the Rosyth workers want to use their real names; they fear what they call "a vindictive management" will take revenge on them. Having lost the battle against privatisation in the late 1980s, having lost the contract to service the Trident submarine fleet in the 1990s and having seen more than 6000 jobs go in the last 15 years, their drink this afternoon is a bitter one. For the most part their language is temperate - but their scorn for Babcock, the company which operates the yard, is as dark as the pint of stout settling on the bar.

According to the trade unions, Babcock is involved in a secret deal to release the Ministry of Defence from an expensive commitment to guarantee work for Rosyth in exchange for a lucrative contract running the Faslane submarine facility on the west coast. The company denies it is manoeuvring to close three docks at Rosyth, with the loss of another 1000 jobs, but its case does not impress the jury at the Glayder Inn.

"It's no surprise," says Peter. "I pity the boys at Faslane when Babcock get in there." He looks around the bar again. "What have they done here? They've not brought one new job to the yard since they took it over. They've been given a sop of contracts and put people out of work."

The guaranteed maintenance work from the MoD is the only thing that keeps the yard in existence. Right now the Ark Royal, HMS Liverpool and three submarines - the Sceptre, the Spartan and the Renown - are being refitted by the workforce of 2000. If the guaranteed MoD work goes, so does the yard. For many whose livelihoods depended on the yard the future has already disappeared.

Two of Peter's companions at the bar now only work casual shifts at Rosyth, earning about #7 per hour, with no holiday pay, no sick pay and no guarantee that they will have work to come back to next week. "I only went back there two days ago and I was getting up for my first shift when the 6am news told me there were going to be 1000 redundancies," says Jim. "I said to myself, how can that be? I've only just started back."

Like another of his drinking partners, Jim served his apprenticeship in the yard, left in 1988 after privatisation, and has been on and off on casual contracts ever since. "There's nothing else to do here in terms of work. It's the yard or nothing," says his friend.

Over another pint, they tell stories of increased casualisation of work, cheaper refits and a fall in the standard of work being carried out. "When it was the MoD, money was no problem, everybody knew their job and the job got done. Now men only work for what they are paid for," says Jim. All of them blame Babcock and the privatisation of the yard for the change in culture. But they are equally cynical about the trade unions and their ability to save any jobs.

An hour ago the Transport and General Workers' Union national organiser, Jack Dromey, was standing at the yard's main gate with a leaked document in his hand which he said showed that Babcock was prepared to give up six years of guaranteed warship work at Rosyth in exchange for the Faslane contract.

When he claimed to have the document on Thursday, Dromey was rubbished by the company and the MoD. So the next day Dromey appeared at the gates with it in his hand. "It shows in black and white that the company is planning to run down Rosyth in return for the Ministry of Defence deal on Faslane," said Dromey. Signed on January 24, the memorandum of understanding between the MoD and Babcock, once the jargon is filtered out, seems to say just what Dromey claims.

"Babcock will give up its guaranteed workload here in exchange for a contract to run Faslane," says Dromey. "It's bad news for Rosyth and bad news for Faslane, and it was denied last night by management. It was confirmed this morning by the same management. So it's clear beyond any doubt this morning who is telling the truth."

When I recount the impromptu press conference at the gates to the workers in the pub they snort with indifference. "The unions told us we wouldn't be privatised. The unions told us we wouldn't lose the Trident boats," says Jim's friend at the mention of the union leader. "We've been there, we've heard it all before." The men in the Glayder Inn feel the closure of Rosyth is inevitable. One of them sums it up: "Too many yards, too little work".

Dromey and his companions admit they are fighting the tide, but they have come up with an alternative to a private monopoly of naval yards. "We want a partnership, but not simply on Babcock's terms," says Dromey. The union has a plan for a joint operation of all four British naval yards bidding for commercial work, which it says the government is not taking seriously enough.

"There is a reducing fleet and reducing demand for maintenance," says Dromey. "You can cope with this either by doing bad deals that slash capacity or by partnership - we bring together the dockyards and the naval bases to bring in new commercial work."

This joint approach works for the Defence Aviation Repair Agency, which brings together the public sector and the private sector in support of the RAF maintenance programme. "It is winning new work, creating new jobs, raising revenue for the taxpayer and defending local communities," says Dromey. "That is what should be done for the navy as well. I don't deny there is a problem but the challenge is getting the right solution, not the wrong solution, to the problem."

The reason the Rosyth yard will be reduced "to a rump", as the unions warn, is that the Royal Navy - once the country's pride and the defender of Britain's rights on the high seas - has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.

Its fleet is the smallest in recent times and the trained strength of its personnel has come down to less than 40,000. As one senior commander remarked recently, if the numbers could be put together in one place they would only make a half-decent crowd at Murrayfield.

The Royal Navy has been badly mauled by successive governments and is still unsure of its role in the world. Both the Nott Review of the 1980s and the Options for Change review of the 1990s introduced unwelcome "drawdowns" - naval-speak for reductions - in equipment and personnel, and there could be more on the way. In the past decade alone, the navy's strength has been reduced by over one third.

Ships are part of the reduction equation. The fleet consists of 129 ships and submarines, many of which are undergoing periods of expensive refurbishment and repair. It is this area of naval operations which has led to the crisis facing the MoD and Babcock and Wilcox.

The revelation of the memorandum outlining plans to scale down the Fife operation comes at a time when the whole future of maintaining the fleet hangs in the balance. In an attempt to drive down budgets and save money, the MoD is engaged in a wide-ranging review of warship maintenance and support, which has been tasked to find more efficient means of servicing the fleet at a time when it has decreased dramatically in size.

At present the Royal Navy enjoys the services of four dockyard facilities. Two are in England (Portsmouth and Devonport) and two are in Scotland (Faslane and Rosyth). Armed Forces minister John Spellar, who was at Rosyth on Friday telling workers that there would be no final decisions until later in the year, has already argued that there is "a problem with over-capacity", a point of view which is shared by senior commanders.

"That's where the numbers fail to stack up," said one naval officer, who acknowledges the fact the review was inspired by the knowledge that the dockyards were only operating at half their capacity. "Quite simply, there is too little work for too many people. Servicing ships might be a specialised business - it's not like putting your car in the garage for the day - but if the ships aren't there, it's difficult to make the case for maintaining a multiplicity of dockyard facilities."

The navy sees no problem in warships being serviced by privatised concerns, arguing that Babcock have not put a foot wrong at Rosyth where they have mixed MoD contracts with commercial work to the benefit of the 2000-strong workforce. As to whether a move to Faslane would benefit or weaken the service, there are mixed feelings.

"I remember the fuss when the Royal Navy's small ships were moved from Rosyth to Faslane in the 1990s, but the world remains pretty much the same," said the naval officer. "Of course there's a historic attachment to Rosyth, but the fact remains that it's no longer a naval base, whereas Faslane, Devonport and Portsmouth are. That alone presents a pretty strong case for harmonising service use with maintenance facilities."

None of that inside military thinking augurs well for Rosyth, but the timing of the trade union revelations of the plans for the base may be crucial in the coming weeks.

It serves as an embarrassment to the Labour party, holding its spring conference in Scotland this weekend, and a personal challenge to Chancellor Gordon Brown. His constituency neighbours the base, which remains a major employer in Fife. There are Labour wheels within wheels too. Dromey is married to Harriet Harman MP, the former Social Security Minister who was dispatched to the back benches early in the Blair government, and most of the full-time trade union officials at the Rosyth gates were afterwards rushing off to give fraternal greetings to many Scottish members of Labour's cabinets in Westminster and Holyrood at the opening of a new trade union office in Glasgow. Later the same unions will be signing the cheques to fund Labour's election campaign in which defence, and defence jobs, are bound to figure as an issue.

It is also ironic that the call from the organised left to save Faslane from privatisation comes at the bookend of a week which saw the radical left blockading the military base in an attempt to close it down.

John Park, a 27-year-old AEEU official at Rosyth, would like it if the world was a safer place, but his objective is maintaining as many jobs at the yard for as long as he can. That means working with the management as well as giving them the occasional bloody nose. "The union is trying to be as responsible as it can in helping the company win commercial work," says Park. "It's a pity you only ever hear about us when there's bad news. There are lots of positive things happening here - we've got apprentice training, and there's a union learning fund so that everyone can expand their skills and help them make their minds up about the future."

The juxtaposition of part of the Scottish population trying to rid itself of naval bases while another section campaigns for the retention of the military-industrial complex doesn't bother him either. "I know people are concerned about defence establishments but you don't normally find them in areas where there's a density of defence-related jobs," says Park. "We're being realistic. We're talking about jobs reliant on defence-related work and how this affects families and communities. That's our focus, but if there's a peace dividend I hope we're part of it."

Some official papers are more official than others. Whenever the MoD institutes a review it sets up a system whereby rival teams put up best-case and worst-case options so adjudicators can decide which to pursue. With the review of warship maintenance and supply in full swing, different scenarios will be examined and tested. The majority will be conservative can-do examples which stand a chance of being put into action but there are are also wild-card options which give civil servants and senior officers a radical outcome.

At first the memorandum alluded to by Dromey seemed to belong to the latter, but when it was produced on Friday in black and white it became obvious that its intent was more fixed, and that it provided the basis for Babcock cutting back on its Rosyth operation in return for a lucrative contract at Faslane.

Up in the Glayder Inn, the four drinkers are getting ready to shout their last orders before setting off on Friday afternoon domestic errands. If the trade union predictions are borne out, they may as well have one for the Rosyth yard before they go. Make that a double - let's have one for the Faslane workforce too.

catch up Privatisation, job cuts, the end of the Royal Navy presence - the workers at the Rosyth shipyard on the Firth of Forth have seen it all. Now unions warn that the owners will release the MoD from a work guarantee contract in exchange for the chance to run the Faslane base on the Clyde.

Copyright 2001
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