Unite's Doug Rooney Seeks "Copper bottomed guarantee" on nuclear jobs

Unite is pressing the government to extract guarantees on British jobs from the Westinghouse-led consortium, which wants to build more than £10bn of new nuclear reactors in Britain.

A joint delegation from Westinghouse and Shaw Group, the controversial US group recently appointed as lead contractor for the work, will fly to London next month to meet ministers from Lord Mandelson's business department and Ed Miliband's energy department.

The companies have promised that "up to 80%" of the contracts to supply reactor components will go to British companies.

But Unite National Officer and TUC president Dougie Rooney, said that the ministers should hold the companies, which require government approval to build the reactors, to their promise on British jobs.

"It's one thing to say it, it's another thing delivering on that promise," he said. "My concern is that given what has happened in the past and that Westinghouse and Shaw are sitting on a global monopoly to build that type of reactor, we have to have copper-bottomed guarantees about that being realised."

Shaw is best known in the UK as one of the main contractors to build Total's controversial Lindsey refinery and made 51 workers there redundant this year, which led to a series of wildcat walk-outs around the country over the use of foreign labour. There is the potential for 10,000 British manufacturing jobs to be created through the nuclear building programme.
Westinghouse announced that it had appointed Shaw to lead its new build programme in the UK on Christmas Eve. Shaw is partnered by British construction firm Laing O'Rourke, which Westinghouse said is consistent with its "buy where we build" approach to business.