Scotland's energy transition is anything but just

Today's media is reporting that one in four Scots oil workers are looking to leave the industry because they have no faith in a just transition. It is very difficult to blame them.

Put very simply, there isn't a just transition taking place in Scotland in any sense whatsoever and there never has been. The purpose of the various initiatives and bodies established which have 'just transition' in their name or which have it in their remit was not really to change how Scotland's energy transition is taking place but to greenwash what was going to happen anyway.

There is a reason for this; it is very difficult to achieve a just transition without central planning of that transition. Someone has to be creating pathways of 'from this to this' if people or communities are to be able to travel that path.

That isn't and has never been what is happening. Our 'just transition' is actually two completely separate processes. One of these is the rapid licensing of multiple private sector operators who are buying the rights to exploit the parts of Scotland's land and sea area which are best able to produce wind energy. This is like the 'enclosure' of Scotland's energy potential.

The other is that there has been natural wastage of jobs in the North Sea which has been accelerated by a number of other factors including government policy, the endlessly varying prices of oil and the flooding of markets with US shale gas among many others.

These two separate processes are not connected in any way. There is no pipeline that is transferring industrial capacity in any coherent way from one to the other. There is no focus on the rights of workers in this transfer. There is no 'TUPE', the employment rights legislation that protects terms and conditions when an industry is sold to a new owner.

Rather we are repeating the failed model which has been used many times before. When rapid deindustrialisation resulted from economic mismanagement in the 1980s, and then again as a result of globalisation and offshoring in the second half of the 1990s, and then when jobs were lost in the financial crisis, we did one thing. We offered training.

That was it. That was the sum total of the justness of the transition taking place. We stood passively at the side and watched private sector forces tear workforces apart and dump them on unemployment lists and then we offered them a short college course in IT and expected them to get a job in a call centre.

There was no planning involved. The politicians did everything they could to support the owners but the absolute minimum possible to support the workers. It is standard laissez fair economics but applied to people instead. As in 'set market conditions' (i.e offer them training) 'and then leave them completely alone'.

You can't manage a just transition if there is uneven development on either side of the transition and there is no effort made to generate comparable jobs. There is no 'matching' between the decline of oil and gas and the rise of renewables. They are happening at their own separate pace. Workers can't plan a transition on that basis.

But there is no consideration given to matching employment types either. A lot of offshore oil jobs are variations on engineering and mechanics. That is suited to manufacturing more than it is to the groundworks of an onshore wind turbine (the use of heavy diggers on oil rigs is, well, 'severely limited').

A rational response to this on the part of a worker would be to write off the likelihood of a just transition and for them and to jump early when there is presumably greater relevant job availability. The longer this process goes on, the tighter the job market will be for former oil and gas workers.

This could have been avoided but it would have required the Scottish Government to step up. At the very, very least it needed a clear overall planning regime and a very strong set of regulations to make sure that the transition was being done in a way that created the right kind of jobs. That means much greater conditionality on the sourcing of manufactured components.

It would have been much better if this had been done in the public interest in public ownership and not as an equity investor jamboree. Then the process might actually have been coordinated and might actually have worked for workers and not just owners.

The argument was that it was simply cheaper to buy the components from China. And so we're repeating the errors of the 1980s (allowing industries to die without a feasible transition plan) and the 1990s (outsourcing manufacturing and offering insufficient training for those made unemployed).

If we had retained the manufacturing then yes, wind turbines would have been a bit more expensive. But they would still have been highly profitable and we'd have maintained high-quality jobs in the economy (with workers paying tax and spending in the economy) which would have created a pipeline from declining industry sectors. That is precisely the meaning of 'just' in 'just transition'.

Unfortunately, Scotland has largely rejected the 'just' part and over the next 20 years at least we will live with the consequences, exactly like we did the last two or three times.