AROUND 600 workers walked out in a wildcat strike at Langage Power Station yesterday, protesting over the use of foreign labour.

Trade union officials said the workers were staging the protest in support of  similar action across the  UK.

The UNITE union, which said it does not condone the wildcat industrial action, told The Herald the entire workforce had walked out.

With dozens of workers failing to turn up for their shifts, virtually all work at the Plympton site ground to a halt by around 10am.

A steady stream of around 35 foreign workers, most originally from Poland, left the site just before 11am. They boarded a coach which had been laid on by their employers to take them home.

Members of the group said they had been told by bosses that they were unable to work under the circumstances, amid health and safety fears over a lack of manpower on site.

Jerry Pickford, South West regional officer for UNITE, said the workers had walked out in “general sympathy with what’s happening in the construction industry”. He said Polish workers were among the 600-strong group.

Mr Pickford said: “All the Polish workers have walked out as well, because this is not an issue against foreign workers.

“This is an issue against foreign employers using foreign workers to stop British workers getting jobs.

“Once they do that they will try and undermine the terms and conditions of employment in this country.”

Unofficial copycat strikes have been staged across the country in support of workers at the Lindsey Oil Refinery in Killingholme, North Lincolnshire.

A dispute at the refinery flared last week after a contract was awarded to Italian sub-contractor IREM, which hired its own workforce from Italy and Portugal.

About 3,000 workers at 11 refineries walked out on Friday and the action has continued to spread, taking in nuclear power stations including Sellafield in Cumbria.

Along with Langage, 500 workers at a Shell refinery in Cheshire and 250 at a Hartlepool engineering company joined the national protest yesterday.

Sympathy strikes are illegal and the wave of industrial action can therefore not be supported by trade unions, although Mr Pickford said UNITE was powerless to stop its members joining in.

He said two plants run by the same company that is behind Langage, French firm Alstom, had faced similar issues to those in Lincolnshire.

Foreign subcontractors excluding British workers was already an issue at Alstom’s Nottinghamshire and Kent plants, he said.

The fear is that British workers could be left out in the cold if there is a jobs boom in the building of a new generation of nuclear power plants in the UK.

Mr Pickford said that in many of the affected areas skilled British workers capable of doing the jobs were available and out of work.

A spokesman for Alstom said it was aware of the strike at Langage, but said only 200 workers had taken part. The spokesman said: “We can confirm that unofficial strike action took place at the Langage power station construction site. We understand that this unofficial action was taken in sympathy with the recent demonstrations at the Lindsey oil refinery.

“Around 200 out of approximately 900 workers who are normally employed at the site were involved, based on our assessments of who turned up to work.”

In August last year around 200 workers went on strike at Langage after 16 employees lost their jobs, some strikers saying they were protesting about the replacement of British workers.

Yesterday, talks aimed at resolving the dispute in Lincolnshire continued, while Business Secretary Lord Mandelson urged striking workers to go back to work. He said: “We should keep our sights set firmly not on the politics of xenophobia but on the economics of this recession.”