Sir Alex Ferguson began his life as a racer in the Glasgow shipyards.
In 1961, at the age of 19, he led an apprentices’ strike with his comrades. Two years later, he became a shop steward at the tool shop, a union representative elected from among his peers to lead them in negotiations with senior management. His politics, like everything else in his life, are red (left-wing for all non-English speaking readers).
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“It was the experience of my union that allowed me to make decisions and run for office,” he told Manchester United television in 2015.
Fifty years later, 30 miles away, another knight of the realm, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, was testing the strength of those same Scottish unions.
Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s most prominent Brexiteers, took over Manchester United after agreeing to buy a 25-cent stake in the club for 1. 3 billion pounds ($1. 6 billion).
That money (he’s the second richest man in the U. K. , according to the Sunday Times rich list) comes from INEOS, a conglomerate founded by Ratcliffe that includes the world’s fourth-largest chemical company. His interests are manifold, but so are those of plastics. productive and sporting investments, it also includes the Grangemouth condominium, home to Scotland’s oil refinery.
After difficult negotiations, the refinery’s union leaders developed a nickname for its owner: “Dr. No. “In 2013, those disputes reached a new point of acrimony and ended, in a reversal of typical hard-work disputes, when Ratcliffe announced his goal. shut down the entire plant if the staff didn’t conform to their “survival plan. “
“We were facing a major trade crisis in Scotland,” said Alex Salmond, then first minister. The unions were frightened and signed the Ratcliffe agreement.
Ten years later, those jobs are again in jeopardy. In November 2023, owner Petroineos (the company is a joint venture between INEOS and China’s PetroChina) announced plans to close the oil refinery and upgrade it with a fuel import terminal, which would charge 400 jobs.
The reason? Lack of cash in the face of market pressures. A month later, on Christmas Eve, Ratcliffe’s £1. 3 billion investment in Manchester United was announced. The moment drew anger in the Firth of Forth, and many citizens of Grangemouth went into Christmas fearing for their long-term futures.
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Ratcliffe’s tenure at Grangemouth provides clues as to how he will look after his new, brighter asset.
There will be investments. . . also dangers and a touch of cruelty.
In central London, just 800 metres from the back doors of Buckingham Palace, is The Grenadier pub. The old officers’ mess hall is owned by Ratcliffe and is strikingly painted red, white, and blue. During the acquisition process, INEOS made a great deal of the fact that it is a British offer.
Inside, under the watchful eye of cavalry officers dressed in bearskins, diners can order meals including guinea fowl, eggplant caviar and bowls of chips for 7 pounds. In his community of Belgravia, the average value of a home is £3. 3 million ($4. 1 million). .
Fittingly, the roofs of the Grenadier are covered with banknotes.
Grangemouth is different. Halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland’s two largest cities, any view of the city includes INEOS installations, smoke, towers and 4,000 kilometres of pipes. This underlines the extent to which the risk of deindustrialization literally hangs over the city.
An estimated 13,000 jobs are either directly or connected to the wider complex, which is wholly owned by INEOS and also houses a petrochemical plant.
Even with this work, parts of Grangemouth are struggling. Bowhouse, a residential domain in the city centre, is among the top five disadvantaged consistent with the top one hundred in the country, according to the 2020 Scottish Multiple Deprivation Index. Three others – the downtown city, Kersiebank East and Kersiebank West – are among the 10 poorest in line with the penny.
“Growing up in Grangemouth, the most important thing is to be close to the petrochemical refinery,” Gillian Mackay, Scottish Greens MP for central Scotland, told The Athletic. “It meant that every time there was a burn, you knew.
“I don’t forget as a kid, the noise outside and what almost looked like a bright orange light turning on and off outside my room. You can see it from as far away as Edinburgh, and in some places, it never gets dark. When we were kids, we never learned how to ride a motorcycle on the road because there were a lot of tankers and big trucks around.
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Ratcliffe was covered in dust and surrounded by deer when he first struck a deal to take over Grangemouth: agreeing to a $9 billion deal to buy BP’s petrochemical business while he was halfway through a mountain bike holiday in Glen Nevis, Scotland. INEOS overnight, Ratcliffe’s plan was simple: clean up the dirt to make the company profitable.
Grangemouth, one of Scotland’s iconic shopping centres, played a pivotal role in this project. The facility accounts for 4% of the country’s GDP and around 8% of its production base. Ratcliffe, who has a background in venture capital, sought to streamline his processes, arguing that it was the only way to make him successful and secure his long-term future. He has reduced the team and related profits, all of which he foresees immediately as part of the ongoing strategic review at Manchester United.
Their movements have been heavily monitored – and questioned – through Unite, which is one of the UK’s two largest industrial unions and has representation in Grangemouth.
He won a swift victory in 2008, opposing final salary pensions, which charge INEOS, by his own estimate, £120 million. Ratcliffe was deeply frustrated, later arguing that the loss prevented further investment in the plant.
Another source of anger, even if it is for a self-confessed workaholic, is that his daughter Julia was born at 3 a. m. in London on the first day of the strike. As a harbinger of what would be expected at Manchester United, he flew to Scotland shortly after his birth to show his solidarity with the refinery management.
Read more about United’s long-term tenure under INEOS. . .
This, in addition to mounting losses of up to £10 million each month, shaped the backdrop to the events of 2013. Both sides were preparing for a fight. Ratcliffe, on the other hand, didn’t just want to avoid making concessions to Unite: he was looking to make his own profits to scale the site towards profitability. The situation erupted after an industry union leader named Stevie Deans, who was a senior manager at the store. butler at Grangemouth, he was suspended through Petroineos due to allegations that he was conducting Labour Party-related business in his working hours.
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Unite accused Ratcliffe of failing to “break” the union by attempting to “attack and target” the deans, and workers voted to remove their jobs in reaction to the treatment of the deans. INEOS, meanwhile, argued that the company was already “uncompetitive” and after a “summer of discontent” with Deans’ stance, “either Grangemouth has to settle for replacing him or shutting him down. “
Ratcliffe also expressed anger over a phone call he won from Unite leader Len McCluskey: “Let the leader of Unite call and threaten to shut us down because we treat his union the same way we would treat any other worker, and he’s not. “A sacrosanct individual, who must not be touched and who can do whatever he wants, is simply scandalous. “
Since then, Unite’s attitude to the strike has been questioned, with other sections of the union acknowledging mistakes had been made. Protests outside board members’ homes further heightened Ratcliffe’s concern.
In response, the tycoon swore to top executives that he would not back down, and so when Grangemouth workers uniformly rejected a “survival plan” he had suggested, which resulted in deep budget cuts, that promise was put to the test.
Ratcliffe will shut down Grangemouth and denounce the union’s deception. Putting 800 jobs at risk, refinery bosses said they might not guarantee severance pay, or even a task until Christmas, just two months later. Scotland’s First Minister Salmond suggested INEOS “get the plant up and running and do it now”.
Ratcliffe played poker and Unite folded. They accepted Ratcliffe’s survival plan, giving in on every aspect. Much of the staff felt conflicted; They had maintained a task that had been threatened, but in much worse situations than before.
Now, Ratcliffe has shifted his attention from Unite to United. What can we learn? Let’s take negotiations as an example. During the shutdown, he accused the refinery’s local Labour MP of “asking for a ransom” from the refinery.
“We were given to listen, we were given to be unflinchingly polite and maintain our charm,” Ratcliffe once said of the U. K. ‘s new Brexit negotiations with the European Union. “But there’s no room for weakness or giving in at 3 a. m. when the going gets tough and most things are won or lost. “
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For a guy who walks into a club with a reputation for being nice in negotiations, this kind of cruelty can be welcomed.
Another key facet of the clash was Ratcliffe’s use of the media, proactively seeking to shape history. Instead of employing its own internal communications, INEOS hired a public relations firm, MediaZoo, to manage media relations during the crisis. Manchester United’s media arm is already known as one of the Premier League’s most troubled examples, don’t expect that to change.
In the months that followed, INEOS also produced its own 26-minute documentary, The Battle for Grangemouth, in which refinery executives rose to the prestige of TV stars, seen as the heroes who maintained Scotland’s commercial capacity. , talk about the importance of managing the media and add that they intentionally leave the doors ajar so that they can simply pay attention to the conversations and announcements that they believe were intelligently presented.
“A real delight” is the last sentence of the documentary, uttered by Declan Sealy, director of INEOS and one of the main negotiators. “We had given Grangemouth a future. “
Ten years later, this claim is outdated. Last November, Petroineos announced the closure of the oil refining business until 2025 due to “significant exigency situations due to global market pressures. “The facility would be remodeled into an import terminal and would create only 100 jobs, a loss of 400 direct jobs and many more indirect jobs. By November 2020, two hundred jobs had already been lost due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s going to be a waste, Grangemouth,” one resident told BBC News last November. “It’s bad enough: look downtown, there’s no one here. “
There is a nuance to this. Most political components in the region recognize that the oil refinery will have to shut down at some point as part of a transition to greener fuel sources. Collectively, the company’s oil, chemical and power plants in Grangemouth produced more than 3. 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2019, making the company the largest source of emissions in the country.
For some, however, this is coming down too quickly, motivated by Petroineos’ preference to avoid further losses, without giving staff the opportunity to educate themselves on transferable skills.
“It’s going to be a transition for staff, a just transition,” Mackay says. “We want this shift to a cleaner, greener industry that will continue on this site for the next hundred years, but also provide certainty about the relocation of those skills to the workforce. We want a longer-term plan: a closure within 18 months is premature and leaves no time to consult with staff or the community. There are no plans for the future.
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In response, speaking to Scottish MPs, Petroineos’ chief legal officer, Iain Hardie, insisted that monetary incentives will be put forward to stay until 2025, stating that they were “absolutely at the heart of our strategy”.
“It is inevitable that we will have to migrate from a fossil-fuel-based system to a non-fossil one,” he added.
While Petroineos insists that staffing is a priority, he has not stopped criticizing the way many have learned that their jobs are in jeopardy. Union representatives were only included in a meeting to discuss Grangemouth’s business future, Scottish newspaper The Sunday National reported. They revealed that they had been excluded in the past.
“I grew up less than two hundred meters from the plant and I can tell you right now that the plant staff is confused, betrayed and furious that they found out about this through an article long after the shareholders were informed of it. ” says Mackay.
“I hope that at some point Sir Jim Ratcliffe and the bosses will come to Grangemouth to communicate with the workers, communicate with the network and tell everyone what their plan is. “
Ratcliffe has not been to Grangemouth since the refinery closure announced in November, the same month he dealt with the details of his £1. 3 billion takeover of Manchester United.
“When you look at the money he’s going to spend on a hobby, as much as I love football, the social impact is greater,” says Brian Leishman, Scottish Labour Party candidate in the Grangemouth constituency.
“The UK’s energy security is indeed one of them, but so is the security of the Scottish economy and the UK as a whole, and its impact on the local population. It’s easy to call other statistics, but it’s other people who have mortgages, who have kids in school, who work to try to improve their lot in life. They’re going to take the hit for it.
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The timing of Manchester United’s takeover has angered many in the region, who feel Ratcliffe’s concerns, as well as his money, have been concentrated when his livelihoods are at stake.
In reaction to these concerns, as well as the procedure by which Grangemouth residents were informed of the threat to their livelihoods, INEOS did not comment.
In November’s The Guardian, journalist Aaron Timms tackled the myth of the flawless billionaire.
“A victory, at last, for blank money, money, English money,” he wrote satirically. Of course, Qatar’s rival bid for Manchester United, led by Sheikh Jassim, had its own wealth of moral objections.
The myth of the immaculate billionaire is a vital perspective. With the sums of money involved in modern football, it is almost very unlikely that a potential client of the world’s biggest clubs would possess an impeccable record. Ratcliffe relocates part of the Glazer family, whose popularity speaks for itself.
Ratcliffe’s record at Grangemouth explains why Manchester United fans are cheering him on. He’s a true fan of his formative years, reacting strongly to bullying, negotiating firmly (some would even say brutally), and knowing how to create a narrative.
If you are aware of public opinion, your record shows that you are guided by it: you will make an unpopular resolution and then fight to justify it.
There is a flip aspect to the coin. At Grangemouth, Ratcliffe found himself in a loss-making operation. The same will happen at Manchester United. At the time, his attempt at rationalisation put him in direct conflict with the workers.
If he had more duties at Grangemouth than his predecessors at BP, then the attention (from enthusiasts and the media) would be even greater in football. His management of the oil refinery ended in vitriol. . . and failure.
When the Glazers bought Manchester United, they made their investment, lowered prices and stood firm despite criticism. This procedure does not seem unheard of.
(Top photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)