The Piper Alpha Disaster and Industrial Relations in Britain’s Offshore Oil Industry

Abstract

This chapter explores the issue of powerful multinationals that dominate safety agendas and dictate working conditions, in the following order. It explains the evolution of the UK oil industry’s political economy and regulatory regime. The chapter examines the Piper Alpha disaster as a key event in the evolution of UK offshore regulation, alongside Lord Cullen’s recommendations aimed at preventing a similar disaster. It describes the industry’s response to the Cullen report, which is characterized by latent resistance to new regulatory requirements and the industry’s continuing prioritization of concerns over costs and expenditures. The chapter provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of safety indicators that throws doubt on industry claims to radical safety improvements since Piper Alpha. It analyzes the development of labor relations in the UK offshore oil industry as the underlying context for the existing safety regime. The industrial relations regime that the US companies had brought to the North Sea was uncongenial to most UK workers.