Jake Molloy has been a plumber, an offshore safety-rep, and a union General Secretary. He spoke to Stephen Smellie and Cailean Gallagher about how his journey led to his work for a Just Transition.

Jake Molloy is a member of the Scottish Government’s Just Transition Commission that published its latest report in February entitled No Time To Lose, which describes how the action needed to achieve a Just Transition had failed to be delivered.

Jake is ideally placed to make that assessment having spent seventeen years as an offshore worker and safety rep before becoming General Secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee (OILC), the only union to manage to organise workers in the North Sea at the time.

He started out as a plumber’s apprentice at the insistence of his father, who didn’t think much of Jake’s idea of staying on at school to do O levels. He did insist that Jake join a trade union, so he joined the EPIU, the breakaway from the EEPTU. Made redundant after he served his time, he was offered a job offshore, and after his first ever flight on an airplane and then a helicopter, he found himself in 1980 on an oil rig in the North Sea.

There he found conditions were very different for the Americans who were employed by Chevron compared to the contractors who were mostly British workers. Jake recalls:

“If you were a contractor, you slept in the four-man cabins above the gas compression module . . . on the other side of the platform, you had your own wee mess hall for your dinner, your tea breaks and all the rest of it. If you wanted to watch a movie, you come right on the platform into the permanent living quarters where the Chevron guys stayed, a lot of them American at the time. You could go into the cinema, but if somebody come in, employed by Chevron, they can ask for your seat and you to leave. Their mess hall was huge. They had the best of grub. It was just two different tiers. It literally was two class societies on a platform.”

There was a big downturn in 1986 as OPEC increased oil production and forced down the price of oil. Jake was unemployed along with thousands of others. “Between 9 and 12,000 were paid off in the space of three months,” explained Jake, “Aberdeen was devastated. All the guest houses, all the wee bed and breakfasts, they were just all wiped out in the space of three months.” The cause of the downturn was a glut of oil from Saudi Arabia and OPEC. “The North Sea was never part of OPEC. OPEC decided to hunt the North Sea because it was producing so much. That’s geopolitics.”

When he got a call to go back offshore, the rates of pay on offer were much reduced. He headed for the Brent Delta where he learned that he was replacing the 45 men who had been killed when their Chinook helicopter crashed in 1986. “We were going into the dead men’s shoes, which was the most awful time ever, ever, ever.” This led him to get involved in the campaign to replace the Chinooks and the issue of safety in the industry.

Safety was never a priority for the oil companies, and trade unions were not present on the rigs. “If you mentioned the word union, you were finished.” They were strong in the construction of the oil rigs and during the ‘hook up’ of the platform, but Jake never saw a union once the rig was offshore. He explained:

“Once [the] first oil hit the platform, the union agreement ended. So, during the most dangerous phase . . . you’ve got oil and gas pumping in high volumes, high pressures, all the platforms, you had no trade union rights. There were a lot of unions involved back then, eleven different unions, who competed against one another to try and organise on shore, but there was nobody, nobody prepared to get involved offshore.”

The situation changed on 6 July 1988 when the Piper Alpha disaster happened. 165 men were killed when the rig exploded, as well as two rescue crew. But that wasn’t the only example of where the lack of concern for safety led to disaster. Jake recalled, “everybody talks about Piper, but you also had the Ocean Odyssey which went over belly up and one guy was killed there.”

Jake was on the Brent Delta when a cooling module blew apart on 1 January 1989. Luckily no-one was killed as they were inside getting their New Year’s Dinner. An investigation by the Department of Energy said it was due to management being drunk as everyone was allowed a tin of beer with their Ne’erday dinner. Jake said, “We knew it was [because] the pressure was building, because we were maintaining it and the differential pressures were obvious, but it just kept going and going and going and going. It was just poor maintenance.”

Breakaway or Blowout

It was following these events that the OILC – Offshore Industry Liaison Committee – was formed. Jake explained, “the word was spreading round the North Sea, surprisingly, because there was no phones, no iPads, nothing yet, it was fax or word of mouth, but the words went round, we were going to take a day action, stop work, on the anniversary (of Piper Alpha) on the 6th of July, 1989. They created a newspaper, Blow Out. Workers were starting to come out and talk about what was happening offshore.”

Ronnie McDonald was the figurehead. He had been sacked and so could be public about organising a union and a ballot was organised. Jake recalls, “the first time I’d ever seen a ballot of any kind. It was a big old coffee tin with a hole in the top and you got handed this wee bit of paper. Do you want a trade union offshore? Yes or no? And then you shoved it in the tin.”

The union was called the OILC as the workers wanted it to be a Liaison Committee with all the other unions. They created the logo to deliberately resemble that of the Polish union Solidarnosc. Prime Minister Thatcher had visited Poland and met Lech Wałęsa and said that was a union she could work with.“So we come up with an idea, okay, we’ll give you a union you can work with then.” This Solidarnosc-inspired logo led to Polish seamen coming to the OILC offices thinking it was a Polish club! “It was funny, and a lot of them joined the union!”

Following the day of action on 6^th July, further action was needed and sit-ins took place on the rigs lasting two or three weeks at a time. The main action was training workers on safety issues and safety rights. This involved universities running courses and mass meetings in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Newcastle and Liverpool.

Initially the trade unions were keen to work with the newly formed OILC and attended these meetings. However, in 1991 the unions decided they were going to make an agreement with the employers, without the involvement of the OILC and its activists and members, signalling to the OILC that they were no longer needed. The OILC organised a ballot of offshore workers who voted to form their own union with 4000 signing up immediately. The new union was refused membership of the TUC or STUC with the reason given that it was a breakaway union. For Jake that was ironic as his first union that his father told him to join was the EPIU – a breakaway union that had been admitted into the TUC! Looking back at that time Jake said, “That was what annoyed me most, because there was nothing to break away from. There was no union established, there was no union trying to get established, there was nothing, there was zero trade union activity in the production oil and gas operating sites.”

It was only when the OILC merged with the RMT, forming the OILC Branch, that Jake and the other offshore workers were allowed to become an officially recognised part of the trade union movement.

Jake is clear that the OILC was a success. “I think health and safety-wise, we changed the whole culture, you know, those safety reps, that was what we built. I was a safety rep when I got elected to the post of General Secretary. We were organising training courses. We had a lot of left-leaning academics that wanted to work with us. We did regular events with offshore workers. The HSE didn’t say publicly but they welcomed every bit of involvement in terms of submissions we did. We changed a lot of the positions, you know.”

The issues facing offshore workers today are very different from when Jake started. The future of workers is threatened by the demise of the industry as investment has declined and the lifespan of the sector reaches its natural end, hastened by the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels. There is much talk now of Just Transition but that was never thought about in the past, despite everyone knowing that the oil would only last forty years or so.

“Everybody thought, we’re going to get a couple of years out of this. The installations have got a lifespan, you know, of twenty years, twenty-five years, whatever.

“But really that was that, everybody thought this is going to be a dash for gas, a mad rush, and then it’s going to deplete rapidly and then that’ll be it. You’ve got to get in, make as much as you can, because we’re not going to be here [long].”

“That [Just Transition] was not really an issue, and it didn’t become an issue really in the mindset of members until really around 2018-19 after the big downturn.”

Oil Aboard!

Jake got involved with the Scottish Government’s Energy Jobs Task Force which is when he learned about Just Transition. The 2018/19 slump was massive and Greenpeace were climbing onto oil rigs. And that was followed by Covid which again devastated the industry. “The oil and gas industry has been like peak, slump, peak, slump, boom and bust. But this one felt terminal.”

It was around this time that links were made with the environmental movement. Jake took the initiative and phoned Greenpeace. He said to them, “You know, let’s get together and here a wee chat.” Later Jake was invited onto the Rainbow Warrior in Aberdeen Port and was interviewed on a social media livestream, with a Greenpeace t-shirt saying “Oil Workers Deserve a Just Transition.”

A few weeks later they, with Friends of the Earth, came up with the idea of surveying oil workers about a Just Transition, and produced the report Our Power where workers expressed their hopes and fears for the future. Jake believes that this collaboration was essential. “They got a far better response than we could ever get out of guys doing surveys and questionnaires and all the rest of it.”

However, as the Just Transition Commission report states, not enough has been done to build a Just Transition, oil workers are losing faith.

“They are losing faith because the way that the job market’s going,” says Jake:

“I had the National Secretary up here again a couple of weeks ago, and he showed me a guy’s contract working on the Sophia wind farm, part of the Dogger Bank, the biggest wind farm on the planet. This guy’s been on the contract for two years. Filipino, £2.95 an hour. That’s what they’re getting paid. You see the job adverts and all the rest of it for renewables, apart from the maintenance side, the skilled side, the tech side, all the construction phase it’s all short-term. It’s literally a throwback to pre-Piper days offshore. You know, short-term contracts, casualised, precarious work done through agencies.”

There are real challenges for the unions trying to organise this new offshore workforce. Jake argued during the pre-Covid downturn that the future was going to be renewables and that the unions needed to collaborate. He organised a joint union meeting through the STUC in Aberdeen.

“We got them all in one room and I did a presentation for them about the need for collaboration, because the industry, whether it was renewables or oil and gas, they were working collaboratively and they were making mugs of us and we had to come together.” Not all unions were prepared to work together, but with the assistance of Pat Rafferty, then Unite Regional Secretary, an agreement in principle was reached at the TUC. “Pat saw the need for change and so we created the Offshore Coordinating Group.”

The aim was to get an industry wide collective agreement to future-proof the industry, which led to the Energy Services Agreement, with the support of 26 oil companies and 19 contractors. Jake continues to work on this, trying to extend it to cover the entire UK continental shelf, linked to the European continental shelf by setting minimal standards for the Danish, Dutch and Norwegian sector, “because transition isn’t just oil and gas, to renewables. It’s the energy sector across the European continental shelf. So we’re trying to do that bottom up.”

However, Jake recognises the difficulty of trying to organise and deliver Just Transition in an industry that is owned abroad by corporate interests. Frustrated, he argues that “we still don’t have a credible plan, and certainly not one which is going to assure workers in the fossil side. And that hasn’t been helped with Grangemouth, it hasn’t been helped in Mossmorran.” He argues that a Plan for Just Transition must include a collective bargaining model to give workers the basis for skills and employment. His vision includes achieving “some of the promised manufacturing sites, … some of the public work programmes to retrofit homes and all the rest of it, some of that, some action.”

“I’m old enough to remember Tony Benn in a Labour government at the time [of the] North Sea boom… [talking about the] British National Oil Corporation: we’re going to set up like in Norway, we’re going to take a share, we’re going to be involved, be partnering up, we’re going to get returns, we’ll have lots of cash flowing in here.”

Jack believes that in the next phase of the North Sea that ownership is important. He says, “We must have part ownership, not [to] nationalise it all, but we’re taking a share of it.”

He points to Great British Energy and the TUC-led GBE trade union board where the fight will be taken up, with the RMT OILC branch submitting a paper on the need for collaboration on energy and climate related jobs. But, he says, “We need some quick returns, some really quick, quick returns to turn it around and get that whole environmental trade union movement back together again and take it forward.”

With the Scottish election coming he says the First Minister must, “get on board with the North Sea Futures Board as a starting point, because his biggest crisis at this minute is the whole energy side, the whole Net Zero side. The urgency lies with getting that whole plan [worked out] with policy on oil and gas, renewables, jobs, workers’ rights. Deal with that and the rest will follow.”

As Jake heads towards retirement, he still supports the branch as they try to deliver the bargaining agreement they have been fighting for. And then?

“I’m a pensioner now, I’ll head to the garden, but I’ll be keeping an eye on things.”