Working-class Scottish roots inspired me to fight for labour rights across the world C
Academic and author explains how his thirst for justice grew from a childhood in Alloa and student labouring jobs
LABOURING on building sites in Scotland, Andrew Ross became familiar with the “tang of fresh mortar and cement and the heft of bricks balanced on a hod”.
Decades later in Palestine, he was back on construction sites, now a New York University professor researching a book on the “stone men” building the state of Israel on stolen land.
At a checkpoint in Jerusalem, a Palestinian stonemason bemoaned this Hobson’s choice.
He said: “They demolish our houses while we build theirs.”
Andrew has written Stone Men, the Palestinians Who Built Israel to tell the story of the displaced who became migrant labour in their own homeland.
Palestinians, their lands purloined, their rights removed, have been forced to their knees by Israel’s brutal military occupation.
The salt in the wound is they must now participate in their nation’s own demise, aiding the physical expansion of their oppressor’s state.
Andrew said: “They feel awful about it. The psychology of humiliation is really quite profound. They are basically building on their own land in locations formerly of their forefathers and sometimes their own families.
“They have no alternative because they really can’t earn much more than a starvation wage in Palestine.”
Andrew, 63, grew up the son of a brewery worker in Alloa, a thriving area of engineering and textile mills which, like so many towns across Scotland, was decimated by deindustrialisation and, ultimately, Thatcher. Andrew said: ”The
town was pretty much hollowed out. The rate of deindustrialisation in the belt between the Forth and Clyde was about as rapid as anywhere in the world.
“It was devastating for the area. When I go back there, I am amazed there are still so many people out of work.” He left in the mid-70s to study English at Aberdeen University and paid his way labouring on building sites. Andrew said: “Many workers I interviewed in the West Bank and Israel, in quarries, factories, and building sites, were doing similar kinds of jobs and in some cases using the same materials. The smell and feel of the materials and the routines were similar. However remote from their circumstances, this personal connection to their craft and toil helped me write the book.”
From construction, he became a casual worker on the oil rigs, a dirty dangerous environment where accidents were frequent. He left after six months, feeling it was too dangerous and stratified.
Like many idealistic youngsters of his era, he headed to Israel and joined a kibbutz, to immerse himself in the “agrarian romance” of working the soil. Andrew remembers one day seeing Palestinian day labourers in the kibbutz, working land most likely once belonging to their ancestors.
It was a tumultuous period in the region and the expropriation of Palestinian land had increased with Israel’s expansion and ambitions to “Judaize the Galilee”.
After he left to travel through Egypt, he regretted not taking time to learn about the lives of the Palestinian workers.
He chose to concentrate on a career in academia and the only place he could
find work was in America. Firstly, he joined University, Princeton Social and a faculty where Cultural and he in then is Analysis the now Ivy New Professor League’s and York has of worked for 25 years. But far from retreating into the world of academia, he became an activist advocating for workers, even against his own employer. In the 90s, he was a key player in a coalition of unions, student groups and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who united in exposing labour abuses in the garment industry. He authored No Sweat, a hard-hitting exposé surveying “the chasm between the glamour of the catwalk and the squalor of the sweatshop”.
He helped expose sweatshops in New York and then in China as work migrated there. He moved to Shanghai for a year and was one of the first to ”humanise” the Chinese workers in the technology industries, scapegoated for stealing jobs from the US and the UK.
Andrew said: “I felt there was a need to put a face to these faceless workers and to humanise them and explore their conditions and aspirations.” onditions in the production sector were grim and, in one technology factory he visited, he recalls the manager warning him there would be a stench.
Andrew said: “He told me the place was smelly. I thought he meant because it was an industrial workplace but he was referring to the smell of the people.
“It was a mix of condescension and partly shame on his part, that female workers were working in such poor conditions and dorms where they lived didn’t have proper cleaning facilities.”
Andrew terms his approach as scholarly reporting, requiring the tenacity of an investigative journalist with the forensic analysis of the academic.
He was an integral part of Occupy Wall Street and agitated against his own university, successfully campaigning for the unionisation of the staff.
When the university opened a branch in Abu Dhabi, he was a founder in the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, campaigning against the appalling conditions of the Emirate’s debt bonded, “tragically underpaid and ill-treated migrant workers”.
He said: “We knew about the appalling labour conditions of migrant workers in Abu Dhabi and we were alarmed the university decided to set up shop there, without consulting any of the faculty.
“We saw an opportunity to leverage the presence of NYU there to try and raise the labour standards for the migrant workforce as a whole in that region of the world.”
The tactic was similar to that of the anti-sweatshop campaigns which shamed big names like Gap and Nike and their links to exploitative factories.
In 2010, two years after the campaign began, NYU announced strong contractual safeguards for workers on the building site of its new facility.
In 2015, Andrew was barred from boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, who banned him for “security reasons”.
He later discovered a private detective had been hired to “dig up dirt” on him, he suspects by Abu Dhabi authorities.
He was instrumental in an artists’ boycott of the Guggenheim and Louvre for setting up museums in Abu Dhabi.
More than 50 activists, including Andrew, launched a “naval invasion” of the Peggy Guggenheim art museum in Venice, arriving by motorboat and taking over the 18th-century palace.
Andrew is a man of integrity and guts and has proved he will put the fight for others before his own interests.
He acknowledges that his roots in the everyday political radicalism of working class Scotland helped shape him but he admits he took that innate sense of social justice for granted at the time.
He said: “When I left Scotland, in many ways I had to reconnect with those principles and relearn them in other places, but I keep very much in touch with Scottish politics and I feel an affinity with the principles which guide them.”
I feel an affinity with the principles of Scottish politics
PROFESSOR ANDREW ROSS