BY BARRIE CLEMENT EED HOPE’


Port Talbot steelworkers’ fight to keep jobs, homes and heritage


There is a massive sign on the strip mill at Port Talbot steelworks declaring: ‘Our People make the difference’.


You can’t blame the 5,750 people still working at the plant for their sardonic smiles every time they see it.


When the India-based conglomerate Tata bought steel company Corus in 2007 most Unite members welcomed the fact it had triumphed in the bidding war for Britain’s steel industry. But it has since fallen from grace.


Its announcement in March of the sale of the business was bad enough. Since then it has consistently failed to keep its workforce in the loop.


And then there is its deeply troubling plan to abandon Tata Steel’s UK pension fund, along with its £485m deficit – and its 138,000 members. Worst of all, the very existence of the plant is in question.


I was born and brought up in Briton Ferry, just five miles from the steelworks. It always an overwhelming presence, physically and metaphorically.


Nearly 20,000 people worked there. It was part of the fabric of the community – if an occasionally malodorous one. But it was a strangely benign smell – to which other heavy industries in the area made a fulsome contribution – because it was the result of well-paid jobs. The pong has gone, but so have most of the jobs.


And thereby hangs the tale. Without the steelworks, one of the few remaining large scale employers in south Wales; Port


Talbot and the surrounding area, will have its guts ripped out.


Three generations of some families have worked there. Take Steve ‘Spud’ Davies, (pictured page 20) who lives in nearby Pyle.


A 54-year-old welder and Unite rep, Steve’s mother and father worked at the steelworks and so does one of his three sons, who drives locos at the plant.


“Without that place I don’t know where we’d be. It’s been a fantastic job. We’ve enjoyed a lifestyle we could have only dreamed about without it. It’s given me a home, a family, it’s given me holidays and cars. And long may it continue for my son’s sake.”


He’s worked there 37 years and was recently earmarked for redundancy among 750 other employees before he successfully appealed against it.


‘Spud’, so-called for his reluctance at primary school to eat anything other than potatoes and gravy, works hand in hand with Mark ‘Pasty’ Turner, who got his nickname because he’s from Cornwall. Spud and Pasty – as their names suggest – have proved a great combination.


Pasty introduced me to 62-year-old Neil Samuels, a Unite member and former ergonomist at the plant, who retired nearly three years ago and lives in Swansea, about 10 miles to the west.


Sitting in Bro’s café, built on part of the old site of the steelworks, Neil said Tata seemed initially to be like an old- fashioned, paternalistic Quaker company.


19 uniteWORKS Summer 2016


“I appreciate what they did in terms of investment in Port Talbot. They put in an awful lot of money. But its recent actions are not up to those standards.”


Not long after Tata took over, world demand for steel plummeted. “The banks who were responsible for the recession were bailed out, but not the victims of it,” he says.


A former trustee of the pension fund, he says senior managers at Tata were unfamiliar with the workings of the retirement scheme. “At first they didn’t seem to understand it – but as soon as they did, they began to distance themselves from it.”


The government’s current rescue


proposals include passing a one-off law to cut current members’ benefits and allow the fund to stand alone without a sponsoring company. That would allow any buyer to avoid taking on the massive deficit.


Meanwhile the plant has come to the end of yet another round of job losses.


Ian Williams, a 32-year-old fitter and Unite shop steward, says it is difficult to exaggerate the impact.


“Some of the 750 who have gone have taken retirement, some have gone out of the door with nothing to go to. Some of them have haven’t done a CV before; they’ve never gone to a job interview. It‘s a massive learning curve.”


The steelworks is key to the economy within a 40 or 50 mile radius. “There are


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