A Turning Point for Wind Energy Jobs: Why the Fair Work Charter Matters

Offshore wind jobs are often worse than those in oil and gas. That's the uncomfortable backdrop to the Fair Work Charter, announced two weeks ago - and the reason it matters

Years of failure to produce good quality jobs

Successive governments have promised that industrial change would bring good jobs to communities that lost their economic base. It largely didn't. Replacement jobs have too often proved insecure, low-paid, or disappeared when the subsidies ran out.

Many former mining and manufacturing towns are now dominated by low-paid work in sectors like logistics, spurred on by financial incentives, weak labour rights, and cheap land. For coastal communities and industrial heartlands that were promised regeneration and instead got enterprise zones – benefiting footloose corporations – this produces understandable scepticism about what economic change actually means for them.

From Brexit-voting Mansfield to Reform-voting Humberside, our failure to manage industrial change well has now become a major feature of our politics.

This is reflected in polling, particularly around the shift to renewable energy. Most people (51%) want a transition focused on jobs and the economy, and not just the speed of it, according to polling by Climate Jobs UK. But fewer than a third (31%) actually believe the transition will create opportunities across the UK, and just one in five people think it will create jobs in their local area. 

Those numbers should worry anyone who cares about the transition to clean energy. Getting these policies right isn’t just about jobs and fair pay, it’s also about trust. 

Steps to make the transition fair

This is why the government’s interim Fair Work Charter is so significant and welcome. The Charter requires companies to give trade unions access to workplaces and to inform workers of their right to join a union, important steps towards future union recognition and collective bargaining. 

In practice, this means developers applying for offshore wind contracts must sign the Charter to participate in the auction. If they don’t sign, they can’t bid, and they don’t get public support.

The Charter works through the government's existing auction system. Developers compete in government-run auctions called Contracts for Difference (CfD) rounds, bidding for long-term contracts that guarantee a minimum price for the electricity they generate. 

To encourage UK-based manufacturing and jobs, the government also offers a Clean Industry Bonus (CIB): extra funding for developers who commit to investing in British supply chains, particularly in economically deprived areas. 

The Fair Work Charter now sits in the centre of this system. Developers must sign it to participate in CfD auctions and access CIB funding. In other words, if companies want public support for their offshore wind projects, they must commit to fair treatment of workers.

This is a big shift in approach, not just in policy, but in process. Under the previous Government, agreements such as the North Sea Transition Deal were made between companies, their lobby groups and the Government, with unions largely sidelined. The new scheme was developed with government, industry, and unions at the table together. That’s a big change in how energy policy is made. 

What makes this approach important isn’t just that it aims to create good jobs in offshore wind, but that the Government is using its leverage as a funder to make worker protections mandatory and deliver broader positive outcomes for communities. 

Critics will warn that these conditionalities add costs and complexity for businesses. But offshore wind developers have already shown willingness to meet significant conditions for Clean Industry Bonus (CIB) funding: the Government claims the recent auction attracted £17 in private investment for every £1 of public money, supporting 7,000 jobs. And the key question isn’t whether we can afford these conditions; it’s whether we can afford the political costs of not having them. 

The principles the Charter establishes shouldn’t stop at offshore wind. Wherever the Government is handing out contracts, from grid infrastructure to retrofitting, the same logic can help drive better, fairer outcomes in the energy transition. And as the Scottish Just Transition Commission recently advised, there are opportunities for devolved governments to follow suit.

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Room for improvement

Despite its significance, the interim Charter has some significant gaps. Onshore wind is entirely exempt from the requirements for the next auction. Small businesses with under 50 staff aren’t covered by the rules either, nor are new facilities, potentially excluding many supply chain workers. Supply chain coverage is generally limited: only suppliers in UK “deprived areas” that developers choose to include in their CIB bids are covered. And there’s no independent enforcement mechanism; monitoring will rely on industry and union self-governance.

What does this mean in practice? A worker assembling turbine components in a small business won’t be covered. Neither will one at a new factory, nor at a supplier that the developer doesn’t nominate for CIB investment. And if a company stops engaging with the Charter after signing, there’s no independent body to hold them accountable. As the unions who negotiated it acknowledge, this is a first step that must be built on.

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What comes next?

The Fair Work Charter is important because it’s based on a simple idea: public investment should maximise benefits for us all. It’s not just about clean power or economic growth in theory, but about real improvements in people’s lives through good jobs.

The clean energy transition is the economic opportunity of our generation, but only if we use every tool available to ensure it delivers for workers and communities. Conditionalities aren’t the only tool, but they’re an essential one. The Fair Work Charter shows they’re politically viable. Now the question is whether this becomes the norm for public investment, or stays a one-off experiment. And whether this first step can survive contact with the ensuing industry lobbying.

The answer is relevant beyond offshore wind. The story Labour can tell about its wider industrial strategy - whether it’s one of genuine transformation or more of the same - may well depend on it.

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