by escotregen » Tue Jul 11, 2006 11:45 am
Hollowhorn I’ve just picked up on your sensible posting on the mythical rubbish that’s talked about the so-called dignity of manufacturing work. My dad was a skilled tradesman and an active trade unionist with a strong work ethic. Like most working-class dads he drummed into me ‘get an education so that you can get an office job and stay out the factories and shipyards’.
What I cannot understand is the sheer prejudice that people have about the retail (i.e. supermarket) industry. I’m all against local domination of high streets by one chain of supermarkets. But that’s a planning issue for local authorities and electors to deal with – it’s not a reason to say that the whole industry is full of crap jobs and low pay. Just as with industry there are plenty of such jobs in retail but retail is also a superb economic success story. This success comes out of recruiting and developing the very best people and making the best of their skills, whether IT, marketing, HRM etc. That is how the sector has become a growing world success story, second only to the USA.
In the Pollok example, as with Shettleston and Springburn, I know from my regeneration work that TESCO worked closely and in co-operation with local interests and with the Council and Scottish Enterprise. In Pollok I understand that they work closely with the admirable community-based Pollok Regeneration Company to maximise local recruitment – and to add to the new employees skills base.
On some comments made by others: As for all the car-parking supposedly provided because the supermarkets only want the Newton Mearns types – again this is more about prejudice than reality. The car-parking levels are largely dictated by Planning, in fact often the supermarkets have to be pressed to provide more than they want to. Supermarket chains are also very unprejudiced and ‘democratic’ in their attitudes. They will take money from anyone! The poor people in the localities that some posters say the supermarkets are not targeting are in fact very much a target of supermarkets. The poorer folk unfortunately are those most likely to buy the poorer quality, highly processed foodstuffs that provide supermarkets with premium profit margins - not nice, but it's the opposite of 'not targeting' the poorer nearby areas.
On another perception, about old Scottish industry; Scottish workers did not get paid ‘real’ wages, they were generally paid lower than elsewhere in the UK. This was partly for location reasons and partly because much of the labour force being displaced Highlanders and Irish (and Baltic state incomers) had to accept low wages to survive.
Scottish heavy industry in the 20th century largely still depended on the protectionist Empire market and associated militarism. The decline of both meant the decline of Scottish industry. Of course, some rose-tinted spectacle-wearing Scots would rather forget all that bit about living off the backs of Empire and war – doesn’t really fit the image of couthy, decent but downtrodden, workers struggling to make a better world. To ascribe the industrial decline to just wages is economically illiterate.
It’s also commonly asserted that an economy dependent on services is not sustainable. Well, that’s yet to be proven. If Scotland had much earlier stopped trying to hang onto the old obsolete industries and took up the new services sectors with a vengeance we might have avoided the utter dominance of the UK by the South East of England… that is driven by their service-based economy. And of course one of the major differences in the post-WW2 Glasgow and Edinburgh experiences is that Edinburgh went full blast for services.