There’s a scene from
the Marlon Brando film ‘On the Waterfront’ that I always remember. Each morning
the mob chooses who will work that day and who will not. Eventually, the
workers are made to scramble on the ground and fight for the chance to work. A
priest witnessing the scene says that nowhere else would stand for this, to
which one of the workers replies “The waterfront’s tougher, Father, like it
aint part of America”. It is from this point on that the priest sets out to
confront this corruption and inequality. There is inequality, too in Scotland,
but it is not the inequality that politicians so often talk about. The
injustice that I want to write about is in the contrast between the treatment
of workers who live within a few miles of each other.
I have a couple of
friends who came to Scotland around the same time that I came back. I don’t see
them often as they live quite far from Aberdeenshire, but we keep in touch by
phone and e-mail. I’ve known them for many years as we went to the same
university in Russia. Nadezhda, Nadia for short, was fortunate. She ended up
working at a university. Svetlana, or Sveta, was less fortunate: she found
herself working for a further education college. The nature of funding for
these two types of organisations is quite different. Because of the SNP’s
choice to maintain free tuition to frequently relatively well-off university
students, the money available for further education colleges has dwindled. One
consequence of this is that staff are frequently left on zero hours contracts. Sveta
found that taking into account preparation time she was getting paid less than
the minimum wage. So she decided to look elsewhere for work. Eventually, she
found herself working for a large discount supermarket. I should emphasise here
that the firm she works for is not little or anything that even resembles
little.
We all like to save
money on our shopping or at least most of us do. I still see people in
Aberdeenshire buying the most expensive brands as if the oil industry is going
to go on forever. But wiser ants save as much as they can and stock up for the
hard times. I love discount supermarkets. The quality is excellent and the
prices sometimes hardly seem possible. But I didn’t know until recently the
full cost of what I was buying.
In Russia we’re used to
employees having hardly any rights. If a waitress drops a plate, she’s liable
to have the cost taken out of her wages. Someone can work diligently for 30
years and suddenly find that corruption means they’re driven out of their work
by threats and bullying. Someone running a mildly successful business can find
that someone from the mob arrives, points a gun at their head and tells them to
give the business away. You accept these things in Russia, because it’s Russia
and nothing can be done. But Scotland, of course, is different. Isn’t it?
Sveta worked at her
supermarket for a while and seemed to be getting on well enough. The work is
quite hard, often physical, but she needed the job and did her best. She passed
her probation period and for the first time in Scotland was getting a regular
amount of money. But for reasons unknown a manager had taken a dislike to her.
This manager kept telling her off in front of the customers and kept being
extremely rude to her. Eventually, she complained to one of the senior managers
about this treatment. He appeared to take her side and accept that the treatment
she had been receiving was unacceptable. The next time she was at work the
manager of the store said he would deal with the situation. But soon she found
that far from the situation improving, it now had become far worse. Now other
managers decided that they, too, had a problem with how she was working. Now
she was told that she was useless, that she was the worst worker in the shop.
She was given tasks to perform against the clock. Everything she did was
monitored. She wrote a letter of complaint out of desperation. Again the
management of the organisation appeared to agree that she was being treated in
an unacceptable way, but again after a short time the bullying increased. Soon
the situation became so bad that she had to go to the doctor because of stress.
She was in tears constantly and fearful even to do the job she had previously
enjoyed. After a single day’s absence, because of stress, her first since
beginning the job, she was questioned on her return, by one of the managers. “Was
it because of me that you were off work with stress?” he asked. What sort of
answer can a stressed worker give to such a question? He then made her sign a
form which said that if she was off sick for one more day in the following six
months she would be fired.
It’s tougher in a discount supermarket, Father, like
it’s not part of Scotland.
Contrast Sveta’s
experience with Nadia’s. Where Nadia works almost no-one is fired under any
circumstance whatsoever. She has a colleague who began work in the same office
a number of years ago. This person has never learned the job that they do in
that office and still can’t perform it to any reasonable standard. One reason
for this is because of continual absence. For the first few years they heard a
variety of ailments given as reasons for absence, until in the end, the reason
for absence was not even given. It was simply an underlying condition which you
were not allowed to ask about. Occupational health were involved as were human
resources, but nothing was ever done. It became clear eventually that so long
as you turned up for work once or twice ever four to six months you were in no
danger of losing your job, even if you couldn’t actually do it.
My two friends work in
the same town, yet the contrast between their treatment as workers in
extraordinary. How can it be that the same employment laws can have such
different results? There needs to be some balance. There’s something wrong if
neither long term incompetence, nor absence are grounds for dismissal. This is
not fair on colleagues who have to do the work of those who are absent and
unable. But neither is it right that the price of our cheap shopping is a
management style that merely pays lip service to the idea that workers should
not be bullied. When verbal and written complaints about treatment lead to an
increase in bullying, it begins to look as if this is the policy of an
organisation that depends on such bullying to drive down costs.
Sveta told me that she
would not expect to receive such treatment in a workplace even in Russia. She’s
right. It’s tougher in Scotland, at least for those working On the Waterfront.
