ABSTRACT
In resuming the tangled history of trade unionism offshore, it is useful to remind ourselves that what had already transpired – the trauma of Piper Alpha, the dramatic labour insurrection of 1989 and again of 1990 – meant that the offshore workforce had come to see itself in a new way. It would no longer tolerate the role of passive victim, far less silent witness to perceived injustice. The workforce had found its ‘collective voice’and it could not now be silenced (Greenfield and Pleasure, 1993). That voice was the OILC. Once mobilized by the OILC, the offshore workforce saw that body as ‘the legitimate and powerful expression of the collective voice of the workers… directed to … the establishment of a particular system of industrial justice’ (Greenfield and Pleasure, 1993: 172).
