THIS was never going to be a normal festive season, after a year which I think we can all agree was pretty horrible. It will be strange to miss out on the normal social events and family gatherings. Instead it is a time to take a break, take stock, and look forward to moving on in 2021.
Like many others, I’m going to be using this time to reflect on the past 10 months or so. On a personal level, for me it has been about the lack of connections with friends and family. It’s been the challenges of working remotely from colleagues, then a rush to deliver the renewable energy contracts we had been working on as part of my job as engineering project manager with Orbital Marine Power.
Last week, we delivered vital components to Dundee for what will be the world’s most powerful tidal turbine, here in Scotland.
This is the culmination of two years of work and to be honest I’m exhausted. That’s why this holiday is so welcome. But for far too many people this holiday will be a stressful time, coming as it does after a year of lost income and deeper insecurity. People have lost their jobs or homes.
For those working in health and social care, what has traditionally always been a busy period will be even more stressful.
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And with so many unknowns remaining around the arrangements for schools, it’s no surprise that teachers have started disputes with their employers about keeping their working environment safe.
We all want to be safe, but there’s no doubt this pandemic has not impacted everyone equally. Too many workers have been asked to put themselves at risk by employers. We’ve heard stories about hospitality workers being told to switch off the Covid contact tracing app and of supermarket workers being told to use up holidays when they have to self-isolate.
Students were stuck in contracts with their private university halls providers at the start of the summer, and then stuck in halls when universities returned to in-person learning and the virus spread.
All these cases were taken up by the Scottish Greens in Parliament this year. We won regular testing for care staff and NHS staff, and we’re still pushing for teachers and school staff to get the same. We stopped evictions over the festive period and we brought rogue employers to the attention of the First Minister. We won a way for students to get out of their accommodation contracts and we enabled the reversal of the unfair grades system which marked pupils down based on what school they go to.
But far too much insecurity remains. The UK Government has extended the furlough scheme until the end of March, but for too many people that means living on 80% of the minimum wage. And we’ve seen from this year that the furlough scheme does not necessarily prevent job losses, especially among those who are on insecure contracts or classed as self-employed.
The UK’s safety net is full of holes, and clearly this crisis has shown them up. The conversation has moved on to what a universal basic income might provide, what level it should be set at and so on.
As we reflect on 2020, we need to move other conversations on, too. We have valued front line workers with applause, we need to start valuing them economically as well. This is about more than a one-off bonus for health workers as the Scottish Government has announced – it’s about pay and conditions.
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Many of those on the front line of this were women. Carers, nurses, teachers, supermarket workers. All sectors dominated by women, and all sectors where wages do not reflect their value. It’s time to value women’s work. This is about moving on from economics that allows a gender pay gap.
We need to move on from an economy that allows already obscenely wealthy people to make huge profits from a pandemic while paying staff poverty wages. We need to address the fact that when it came to Covid restrictions it seemed like one rule for a privileged few and another for the rest of us.
And it’s certainly past time to move the conversation on the climate crisis forward. I was shocked that the Scottish Government’s climate plan last week still hinges all our hopes on technologies that haven’t been developed yet.
We’re running out of time, and every year that ends with yet more growth in investment in road expansions, fossil fuel extraction and aviation is a year closer to total climate breakdown.
Let’s make 2021 the year we move the conversation forward.
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