Work and Volunteering [Primer #2]

‘The Commonwealth Games in 2020 will be a spectacular display of world-class sporting talent. But success won’t just be measured in medals. It’ll be measured in jobs and the development of our businesses.’ (Glasgow 2020)

WHAT’S THIS PRIMER ABOUT?

Apart from a few sports centres and libraries (that should have been built years ago) and ‘young professionals’ moving to Dalmarnock, what is the Games Legacy that’s been promised to people who’ve lived in the East End for years? Houses and jobs.

In an upcoming primer, we’ll weigh up the promises of more social housing in the East End. In this primer we’re going to take a critical look at the promises of more jobs during, and after, the Commonwealth Games, and question whether more work is really the best solution to our problems. We’ll repeat the crucial question Games Monitor always asks, ‘Who’s really benefiting from the Games?’

 HOW MANY JOBS ARE THEY PROMISING?

The promotional materials that’ve been posted out, pasted up and printed in the papers over the last seven years have been really vague. However, recently some numbers have been mentioned, or rather one number has been mentioned, with no evidence.

Fergus Ewing, the minister for Energy, Enterprise and Tourism, said at the end of 2013 that ‘Every tourism event attracts a potential new business or leisure guest – and provides more jobs and investment. We are already seeing the benefit of this through the 30,000 jobs supported as a result of the Commonwealth Games’. We asked Mr. Ewing for some more information about exactly what these 30,000 jobs were. We’re yet to get an answer.

We have noticed though that the Queensland’s Government, who will be holding the next (and as we’ve recently heard, possibly last-ever) Commonwealth Games, ‘has pledged that over 30,000 new jobs will be created in the Gold Coast‘. A recent email from the ‘Marketing and Engagement Team’ for the games, informed us of ‘Up to 30,000 Vacancies… to help deliver the Glasgow 2020 Commonwealth Games in the Catering, Cleaning, Hospitality, Security and Waste sectors’ at a ‘Job Fair’ in late January of this year. ’30,000 contractor vacancies’ were mentioned in a Herald Scotland article in September last year. Maybe things really do work best in units of 30,000, or maybe this figure has pretty much been invented. These kind of employment statistics in relation to large scale regenerations figures are basically always inflated, including in previous Glasgow projects, such as the M74 development, routinely claimed as a Games Legacy. Politicians and policymakers like to call this particular form of lying ‘aspirational’.

 WHAT TYPES OF JOBS?

‘We have got to find ways of getting more people into the labour force and if we are spending money it should be on getting people back to work. There is no way we can prosper where you have this number of people sitting around.’

(Richard Cairns, Glasgow Chamber of Commerce)

While the Council have been promising a flood of jobs East of Trongate since the Parkhead Forge closed, this sudden influx of exactly 30,000 jobs isn’t going to last long. In their own words ‘The majority of our roles are advertised on the basis of a fixed term contract that will expire after the Commonwealth Games have been staged in August 2020, or sooner in the case of short term roles’. While ‘Precarity’ and temporary, poorly-paid work is nothing new for the East End, this does reflect a wider change. ‘Since the late 1970s, job opportunities available in the service sector have generally been of a much lower quality – in terms of pay, job security and job satisfaction – than those lost in traditional manufacturing activities’. The trend is for less secure work, worse conditions, no holidays, no pension and more reliance on welfare, payday loans and other forms of debt. The Games will do nothing to change this. In fact it, and the longer-term Clyde Gateway project of which it is a part, will restructure work for the worse, letting private companies use welfare to avoid having to actually hire workers on the kind of long-term contract you can build a passable life around. This is standard for ‘policies developed by middle class bureaucrats and politicians [who] have little real knowledge of the increasingly difficult conditions facing working class people in negotiating the labour market.’

If private companies, the developing businesses mentioned in our opening quote, only need to hire workers on short-term irregular contracts, they save on healthcare, insurance, and costly battles with unions, along with all the downtime they used to pay workers for. Let the state pay for these things they say, while pretending with their other face to be in favour of the free market. They even try to blame us for this situation which they’ve created, calling us work-shy skivers, when really they want to keep us going on and off the dole to cut their costs. They’re the one’s benefiting from the Games, not us.

 WHAT ABOUT VOLUNTEERS?

In addition to this, the council are looking for 15,000 volunteers. Given how tough it is to make ends meet right now, the fact that this amount of unpaid work is going into the Games is a total joke. It also makes a farce of promises of a ‘Living Wage’ for Commonwealth Games staff when a third of those making the Games happen will be receiving no pay packet, no accommodation and only ‘refreshments’ (in other words, no lunch or dinner) for their eleven full days of work.

BUT WHAT ABOUT AFTER THE GAMES?

As with many previous, large-scale regeneration projects, there’s an assumption made that private investment will stream in after the booster shot of public subsidy has been administered. Basically, no one knows for sure if this will happen, including Clyde Gateway / Glasgow City Council. Regeneration promises are guesses based on guesses of what they hope private companies will do. Previous guesswork like this has resulted in half-empty blocks of flats all along the River Clyde, abandoned ‘business zones’ all over the city and, down south, increasing inequality and poverty in Hackney after the London Olympics. Promises are one thing, but the evidence of the past is that projects like the Commonwealth Games won’t make things better for those in poverty, and can actually make them much worse.

Furthermore, as our upcoming primer on gentrification will argue, the people who’ve been living in the East End up to this point are unlikely to get to stay in the area if regeneration really takes hold. We’ll all be lucky to have houses, let alone jobs.

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?

It means we shouldn’t buy the message that the massive public subsidy, displacement, bulldozing of day care centres and other business-as-usuals for the Commonwealth Games will be worth it, because it’s going to sort out the lack of work in the East End.

It’s also important to think about whether more jobs is really the only way to make our situation better. While we all want to feel we’re getting to be part of the larger world, to feel useful or using our skills, is waged-work the only way to do that? We can’t go back to the old forms of mass employment, and the Council and Government’s way forward isn’t going to work. We need something else. While opposing the Games, we should also take time to think together about what this other way of doing things could be.