Dundee councillors are calling for an urgent meeting over the city’s troubled waste-to-energy plant in the face of a strike threat over a pay claim.
Dundee Energy Recycling Ltd (DERL) believes there is considerable misunderstanding over issues at the Baldovie site and is anxious to defuse the dispute.
Workers are furious at being offered only a 1.5% pay rise for greater productivity a real-terms pay cut when the pay packets of directors have grown by 27%.
They have voted in a consultative ballot under employment legislation with a view to taking industrial action, and the result is due soon.
Labour councillor Brian Gordon is concerned about the strike threat and other developments, including the recruitment of outside contractors for work he understands the workforce could have carried out.
Mr Gordon, a member of the council’s DERL working group, said: “DERL brought in outside contractors for what I was told was largely labouring, non-specialised work during the fire closedown.
“The plant’s own workers were under-used, so why were the outsiders brought in? Surely DERL could have saved money by using the skills they had in their own workforce?
“After a year without a pay increase, the workforce are being offered a 1.5% rise with strings attached. Yet the company’s balance sheets for the last two years available show the directors’ remuneration rising in that time by 27%. How can this be justified?
“I am calling for a meeting of the council’s DERL working group as a matter of urgency to find out what’s going on.”
A spokesman for DERL said: “The 27% increase in directors’ pay was over the period between 2009 and 2011, preceding the 2012 fire, but there was no increase in the basic rate of any individual director’s pay over the same increments given to staff over those two years.
“The figures are distorted by the additional costs in the transition from one managing director to another, who had to be recruited at prevailing market rates.”
A second director, whose pay had not changed since 2002, had to put in additional time to recruit a new managing director and run DERL until his arrival.
No other directors are paid.
The company said the outside contractors were needed for specialist work. DERL employees were fully deployed at the time.
The spokesman added: “We are still awaiting a formal response from the union regarding our proposed pay increase for DERL staff in 2014 and we do not wish to comment on the specifics of any pay negotiation while active discussions are taking place.”
Council chief executive David Dorward said he is trying to organise a meeting with councillors for this week.A troubled historyDERL, which collects the city’s waste and burns it to produce electricity for the National Grid, has had an unhappy history.
A major fire in 2012 stopped production for more than a year and 20 jobs were shed in a cost-cutting measure.
The company, which has run up losses of about £50 million, then appealed for £30m for a major upgrade to secure its future for the next 20 years.
The council, which hopes to sell the plant to a new owner, has lent it millions of pounds in the last decade recently almost £8m for improvements to both boilers.
Continuing to support the venture was expensive but was deemed the only viable option, compared to paying heavy financial penalties that come with burying waste as landfill.