By Tom Barker
For more than 70 years, the communities of West Cumbria have provided the labour, skill, and experience through the various iterations of the nuclear facility at Sellafield, now in the process of being decommissioned. The work done by these communities has contributed to the immense riches of their employers.
According to its most recent statement of accounts, Altrad, an industrial services company sub-contracted to carry out work at the site, made £37 million in profit from revenues of over £487 million. In 2024 alone, Altrad paid out more than £25 million to its shareholders!
Despite this largesse with their investors, when those who actually do the work ask for even minimal improvements, they are met with ruthless opposition. Since 15 September 2025, Unite the Union members working at Sellafield have been taking industrial action to demand ‘site-specific pay’ to compensate for the specific dangers faced by workers on a nuclear site – something which is normal practice in comparable jobs. Rather than meeting with workers to discuss how their concerns can be addressed, bosses at the sub-contracting firms at Sellafield have responded with union-busting and retaliatory layoffs.
These malicious attacks, directed at the very communities which have staffed the site for generations, must be fought by the entire labour movement. But they also require political solutions. Your Party MP Zarah Sultana has recently been making the case for nationalising the “commanding heights of the economy”. She is absolutely right!
Privatisation has succeeded only in making working class people pay more for less, while the super-rich make out like bandits. But the case of Sellafield shows that we also need a specific type of nationalisation that displaces those currently at the top.
The nuclear site in West Cumbria is run by Sellafield Ltd and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, both of which are already state-run and both of which have allowed sub-contracted bosses to undertake union-busting tactics. Clearly, therefore, nationalisation must also be accompanied by democratic workers’ control, so that these organisations are run genuinely in the interest of working-class communities.
