The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
The pain of workers and their families is all too familiar
Timex is, of course, the daddy of them all.
The closure of the Dundee factory in the early ’90s was the start of a terrifying decline in manufacturing and skilled labour in the City of Discovery.
For quarter of a century now, major employer after major employer has either shut down or drastically cut staff numbers.
There’s a good chance if you are reading this and have a connection to Dundee then someone you know has been affected by redundancies at companies like Levi’s, NCR, Michelin and now building contractor McGill and Co.
I’ve been unfortunate enough to report on many of them and whatever the business – whether it’s a factory or football club going into administration – the faces of the staff affected always look the same once the axe actually falls.
People with bills to pay and families to support are suddenly confronted with the brutal reality that, unless a spectacular redundancy package is in the offing, their lives are immediately going to change for the worse.
Last week it was workers at McGill and Co who were given the dreaded news at a meeting in Dundee’s Apex Hotel.
Workmen and office staff alike were summoned to the meeting all fearing, but hoping to avoid, the worst.
Some, arriving together in company vans, had plenty of gallows humour, even if it was accompanied by confusion over how a seemingly viable business had been allowed to fail with the immediate loss of 374 jobs.
Many arrived alone, accompanied only by their anxieties, while others were supported by family members.
One man was dropped off in front of the hotel by his wife, their young daughter asleep and oblivious in the car.
Some stayed in the meeting just long enough to hear confirmation their jobs were gone before storming out. The majority stayed for the duration. For most, though, fatalism had been replaced by anger at McGill’s fate.
There’s always an autopsy after a sudden death and the subsequent political row over what led to McGill’s demise has been as predictable as it has been disheartening.
It soon emerged that not only had a bank suddenly closed McGill’s overdraft, negotiations for a crisis loan from Scottish Enterprise went nowhere.
Business minister Jamie Hepburn got passive aggressive in the Scottish Parliament, accusing Dundee-based Labour MSP Jenny Marra of engaging in “political knockabout” over McGill’s downfall after she demanded to know why the Scottish Government had not stepped in to provide the £2 million loan that could have saved the company.
Mr Hepburn’s response, and that of Scottish Enterprise, is to blame McGill for not producing a turnaround plan quickly enough for them to carry out due diligence on the proposals.
But given the scale of the job losses, coming hard on the heels of the announcement more than 800 jobs are to go at Michelin, a more proactive approach should have been taken in order to save the company – and other firms that may be dragged down with it.
One would hope there would have been a bit more urgency than occasional email reminders a plan was necessary.
Scottish Enterprise may well have been frustrated by McGill’s management but there are now
374 families suffering because of managerial and governmental inaction, rather than the viability of the company they worked for.
Dismissing anger about that as “political knockabout” is an insult to all those whose lives have been thrown into turmoil by the loss of their jobs, and those elsewhere whose jobs may now also be at risk.
Last Postings?
When Tim Berners Lee invented the internet, he probably didn’t foresee half the trouble it would cause.
A week doesn’t go by without some story about the insidious dangers of social media and cyber bullying.
The internet is also blamed for killing our high streets, with HMV and its subsidiary, Fopp, the latest casualties of online shopping.
All of us shop online, even if many of our purchases – particularly those made after an evening refreshment or two – are unnecessary.
This might explain why my shelves groan under the weight of bootleg CDs of The Cramps, at least a dozen books on the history of
baseball and copies of Withnail and
I on DVD, Blu-Ray and Betamax, just in case.
Towns like Kirkcaldy have been particularly badly hit.
The Lang Toun’s High Street is barely a shadow of its former self, so much so that one of its main shopping centres, The Postings, went up for auction this week with a starting price of just £1. Eventually, the mall went to an online bidder for the princely sum of £310,000. Hopefully, the buyer has a plan for The Postings that will bring some life back to the town’s High Street and isn’t just another impulse purchase to be regretted in the morning.