Workers at the Automatic Weapons Establishment have announced they are to strike for two further 24-hour periods, as the long-running pensions battle continues.

The strikes will take place on 10 and 18 May and are a result of pension proposals, made by Unite to ‘break the logjam’ in the pensions dispute, being ignored by the company, Unite said. The strikes will take place at Aldermaston and Burghfield and include 700 workers.

These are on top of the strikes already planned for the 4 and 8 May, bringing the total number of strike days to 18 since last November. The 10 May strike will coincide with the regulatory ‘site exercise’ day when the AWE runs through, with the local councils, the scenario of a nuclear incident on site.

The dispute surrounds promises on their pensions made by the then Conservative government in the early 1990s when AWE workers were transferred to the private sector.

Unite claims that the promises have been broken as a result of the closure of the DB scheme in January this year. Unite came up with alternative proposals, prepared by pension experts, for a new DB scheme, but it said they have not been acknowledged.

Unite regional officer Bob Middleton said: “We have not received a response or even an acknowledgement to the pension proposals that we sent to the AWE management on 13 April. We put forward these proposals in good faith, but our members feel that they have now been snubbed. We have decided to strike on 10 May as AWE is planning to stage the regulatory ‘site exercise’ on this day.

“AWE has to hold an exercise, working in conjunction with the local authorities, practising how it would handle a nuclear accident at AWE Aldermaston and Burghfield. This exercise takes months of planning.

“It is for the AWE to say what contingencies it has in place to take account of the fact that our members, who would have been central to the successful completion of this exercise, will be on strike on 10 May.”

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