June 19 (Bloomberg) -- Total SA, Europe’s third-biggest oil company, said contract workers were fired at its Lindsey oil refinery in northern England after “an unofficial illegal walkout” that began last week.

About 600 workers employed by Jacobs Engineering Group Inc., the main contractor, and Shaw Group Inc., a sub- contractor, were dismissed, Emily Cooper, a U.K.-based Total spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview today. About 150 workers are protesting outside the refinery, she said.

Construction workers building a hydro-desulfurization unit at the 221,000 barrel-a-day refinery downed tools on June 11 to protest planned redundancies. Work on the unit, due to start producing ultra-low sulfur diesel by the end of the year, is “closed briefly,” Cooper said. The action has caused a delay in start-up, she said, without being more specific.

The strike sparked a wave of industrial unrest across the U.K., ranging from BP Plc’s chemicals plant in Hull to Scottish & Southern Energy Plc’s Fiddler’s Ferry power facility and Drax Group Plc’s coal-fed plant in Yorkshire. The contractors at Lindsey held a protest last month against the use of foreign labor at a time of rising unemployment in the U.K.

Earlier, the British Broadcasting Corp. said that almost 900 workers were being laid off at the site, without saying where it got the information. Total’s Cooper rejected that figure.

RWE Plant

RWE AG’s U.K. unit said contractors at its Aberthaw and Didcot power plants stopped work today in support of strikers at Lindsey. About 300 workers at Aberthaw in South Wales and 60 workers at Didcot A in Oxfordshire downed tools, RWE Npower said in e-mail. Operations at the plants weren’t affected.

About 150 contractors remain offsite at E.ON AG’s Ratcliffe coal-fed power plant after leaving the site yesterday, Andrew Barrow, a spokesman for the German company’s U.K. unit, said in a voicemail message. The power station is generating as normal, he said.

Unite, the U.K.’s largest trade union, is meeting with Total this morning, spokesman Ciaran Naidoo said by phone.

Efforts by Acas, a U.K. government-funded dispute resolution service, had failed to broker an end to the dispute. Total had refused to hold direct talks with unions until the workers returned to their posts.

To contact the reporter on this story: Nidaa Bakhsh in London at nbakhsh@bloomberg.net. Rachel Graham in London at rgraham13@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 19, 2009 06:00 EDT