Kevin McKenna: Amid strikes, the establishment tries to dehumanise the working-class

The reactions of foreign visitors ranged from mild incomprehension to outright disgust. For many, it would have been their first venture overseas following the pandemic and they would have chosen Scotland, not simply for the festivals but for its beautiful wild spaces. To many of them, clean, green and wide-open Scotland would have represented the final stage of recovery from the global pandemic. They would have come here seeking a healing of sorts.

What greeted them instead was our most beautiful city looking decrepit. Edinburgh is now stinking as mountains of untended rubbish moulder in the soaring temperatures. With another week or so of the festival remaining, this situation simply can’t continue and the meeting between the unions and Cosla must produce a solution.

Almost as malodorous as the stench from the piles of rubbish was the reaction of politicians and assorted right-wing commentators and lobbyists to the impasse. It was the greed and unreasonable behaviour of the striking cleansing workers which were to blame. One bizarre tweet from a right-wing lobbyist even appeared to suggest that the striking workers were exploiting the war in Ukraine to advance their claims for a modest 5% wage increase.

Many others in the UK’s political establishment north and south of the Border instinctively share this view. That the summer wave of industrial action by mainly working-class men and women is a callous attempt to enrich themselves during an extended period of global uncertainty. It proceeds on an iniquitous sliding scale of recompense where jobs which are considered more cerebral and which might require a university degree should be assumed to be better paying than those which are not.

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Such an unimaginative and supercilious attitude also comes with other lazy assumptions. That manual workers or service employees shouldn’t really expect to be paid more than the average wage. And besides, isn’t anything more than the Living Wage something of a luxury? After all, these manual types would probably spend it all on drink, scratchcards and Pot Noodles. They’ll be telling us next they want to save up for a deposit – and we all know what that means.

One day, we’ll be waking up to discover that a train driver or a nurse or a bin-man has moved in next door. And we can’t be having that. They’ll be unloading Lidl bags in broad daylight and putting up bouncy castles every time there’s a birthday and a Holy Communion. Aren’t these gated Chardonnay estates supposed to keep these types of people out?

By Jove; our parents didn’t send us to Fettes or Glasgow Academy for this. It’s not what’s supposed to happen. We get a private education which more or less guarantees us a place at a Russell Group university (anything else is for social workers and IT types). And then we get a job in the proper professions (law, medicine, accountancy).

A political career can be an option if we get bored.

You can’t just start handing out £40k-plus wages to the oiks. They’ll just want what we have.

What the last three months have revealed is that the country can’t function properly without transport workers, supermarket assistants, refuse collectors, nurses and those who make buildings and grow food with their hands. We have an unfortunate tendency to lump these workers together under the heading "unskilled".

This makes it easier to dehumanise them. It desensitises us to wage inequality by immediately introducing an imaginary and pernicious quality-of-life aspect.

If you’re "unskilled" then you should just be thankful that you can earn enough to feed, clothe and heat yourself.

We choose not to recognise the hidden skills and qualities that the "unskilled" masses have. These might include: good parenting, the social gifts and generosity required to maintain charitable work or caring for elderly or sick friends and relatives. We choose also to ignore the fact that by paying them all a dignified wage they might be better able to boost the local economy.

Working class people tend not to buy shares in overseas corporations or employ tax accountants to hide their assets in dodgy overseas jurisdictions rather than contribute financially to the wellbeing of their neighbourhoods. Only when we declare war on the working class people of other countries do we stop calling them unskilled. Then they become “heroes”.

What the recent wave of strikes has shown, though, is that while we literally cannot function as a society without these workers, we can easily manage our affairs without corporate lobbyists, political advisers, business consultants and project managers. Politicians are barely tolerated because we employ them to spend money on our behalf where it’s most needed. Journalists only justify their existence when they question how that money does get spent.

Political types become desperadoes when they accuse striking workers of exploiting global uncertainty for their own ends. Working class people are grossly under-represented at Holyrood and Westminster and not a single major newspaper in the UK advocates on their behalf. Taking strike action for a reasonable pay following years of below-inflation pay rises and cuts to the labour force is the only weapon left in their armoury.

During the pandemic we applauded them from our doorsteps every week and television news programmes patronised by making them the subjects of sentimental human-interest stories. Occasionally, the £500k-a-year presenters wept at the emotion of it all.

Underscoring all of this was something stark: that while the rest of us were joining Zoom meetings, they were actually putting themselves at risk of infection from a lethal disease. During this time, as we’ve come to discover, some of the richest people in the world were exploiting the pandemic by enriching themselves speculating on specific markets and companies they knew were thriving on Covid-19.

And we now also know, courtesy of a startling story in Scotland on Sunday at the weekend, that the Scottish Government has paid companies owned by a billionaire Tory donor more than £40 million in providing recruitment services for the NHS in Scotland.

Politicians, businessmen and corporate lobbyists spend a lot of money concealing how much they pay very rich people to solve problems they created. Then they spin the fiction that it’s the poorest-paid workers who are causing the problems by asking for a few percent more.