Security staff at Gatwick Airport to strike at business period of the year

In a dispute over pay Gatwick Airport security staff are set to stage a two day strike on 10 August from 6am which will “cause travel disruption” the union Unite said.

The union said most of the 130 staff who scan passenger’s luggage and are employed by ICTS are paid less than £9 per hour.

Jamie Major, Unite regional officer said, “It is high time the airport got its priorities right and starts investing in its hard-working staff, instead of paying millions to its shareholders.”

Coby Benson, of compensation law firm Bott & Co said the strike are to fall “in the midst of peak holiday season in a busy month for air travel in general.”

Harland and Wolff staff lock themselves inside as shipyard put up for sale

Workers at Harland and Wolff shipyard locked the gates yesterday and called on Boris Johnson to nationalise the site amid fears over its future.

Protesters at the site in Belfast said that they would refuse to reopen the gates until their jobs were guaranteed. Harland and Wolff, which has about 130 staff and specialises in marine and energy engineering, was put up for sale by Dolphin Drilling, its Norwegian parent company, which filed for bankruptcy last month.

Trade union leaders have called on the prime minister to intervene, urging Boris Johnson to help to save the yard by taking it into public hands. Susan Fitzgerald, the regional co-ordinating officer for the Unite union, said: “Mr Johnson will this week make his first visit to Northern Ireland as PM, and Unite is again calling on his government to nationalise Harland and Wolff.”

The shipyard had tens of thousands of staff when it was a hive of production a century ago. It was the site of the Titanic’s construction.

Joe Passmore, a steelworker, told BBC News: “It was always assumed the management and politicians would come up with a plan but so far they’ve failed, but we aren’t prepared to see this place fail when we know it can be viable and vibrant.”

Picture: Rebecca Black/PA

Future of Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port factory in grave danger

Boris Johnson is playing “no-deal roulette” with the future of the Ellesmere Port car plant, unions have warned.

Amid reports that PSA, the factory’s French owner, would close it in the event of an unsatisfactory Brexit, leaders of the Unite union said that the prime minister was in danger of undoing talks to bring the next generation of the Vauxhall Astra and other cars to the site in Cheshire.

The plant, which opened in 1962, employed 12,000 workers in the heyday of the bestselling Vauxhall Viva. In 2011 it still employed 3,500 people. However, since PSA, the company behind Peugeot and Citroën, bought the European assets of General Motors — namely Vauxhall and Opel — two years ago, the workforce has dwindled to a little over 1,000. Last year the factory made 77,481 Astras. It has capacity to build 200,000.

Ellesmere Port makes only the Astra and is the company’s sole British carmaking plant. PSA has said already that the next generation of the Astra will be built in Germany from 2021, with Ellesmere Port as a secondary plant. Carlos Tavares, 60, PSA’s chief executive, told the Financial Times that if Ellesmere Port was not profitable after Brexit, he would switch production elsewhere.

Steve Turner, assistant general secretary of Unite, said that there had been positive talks with PSA, but added: “All that hard work is hanging by a thread as Boris Johnson and his government of hard Brexiteers play no-deal roulette with the livelihoods of thousands of Vauxhall workers and their colleagues in the supply chain.”

A spokesman for Vauxhall UK said that work for Ellesmere Port would be conditional on the final terms of the UK’s exit from the European Union . . . PSA has put into place a comprehensive ‘no-deal’ contingency plan.”