Coronavirus: Job crisis looms as furlough comes to an end – Richard Leonard

After Scottish Labour launches its Jobs for Good campaign, party leader Richard Leonard says Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses in the economy that already existed

Hundreds of staff at Rolls-Royce's Inchinnan plant are due to start leaving for the last time this week (Picture: John Devlin)

Scotland’s latest unemployment figures will be published on Thursday. Sadly, the condition of Scotland’s labour market is unlikely to have improved since last month’s figures, which showed Scotland had a higher unemployment rate than England, Wales and Northern Ireland. For the past few weeks, job losses have been in the headlines every day, with businesses hit hard by the lockdown, and struggling to see how they will survive after the end of the furlough scheme.

We should not mistake high street reopenings for a sign of post-pandemic economic recovery. Indeed, many of the recently announced job losses – such as the 200 proposed lay-offs at XPO’s North Lanarkshire Argos warehouse – will only be accounted for in official figures months down the line.

That unemployment has already risen so rapidly, in spite of an unprecedented intervention by government – which has literally taken over the payment of private sector wages – should worry us all. It confirms that the weaknesses in our economy existed long before Covid-19 reached our shores. So that when we urgently needed personal protective equipment for our health and social care workers, we lacked the manufacturing capacity to make it – so much so that one national newspaper hired a Boeing 767 to fly it in from China.

Many councils in Scotland have struggled to maintain rigorous cleaning regimes in public buildings, having seen their budgets cut year after year. The long-term managed decline of Scotland’s industrial base, compounded by the SNP’s hit-and-miss interventions and rescues, has left our economy unable to weather shocks. Just as Scotland was unprepared for the public health and care crisis, so, too, Scotland is unprepared for the economic crisis.

That is why Scottish Labour has launched our Jobs for Good campaign. We need a quality jobs guarantee scheme now, or we risk unemployment on a scale not seen for decades. The UK Government’s Kickstart scheme recognises the need to target support at young people out of work, but Tories speak of jobs paid “at least” the minimum wage, workers employed for “at least” 25 hours a week, and work guaranteed for only six months. So I fear it will deliver short-term, part-time, low-paid jobs with poor terms and conditions, and few opportunities for quality training and the development of skills.

I am proposing that Scotland can and must go much further. A quality jobs guarantee scheme would mean fairer jobs, with people paid at least the real living wage and an offer of free childcare to help parents and carers remain in work. It means greener jobs, which contribute to reaching net-zero carbon emissions in Scotland. It means better jobs, with full-time employment or training to give people skills they can use for the rest of their lives.

The Scottish Government must also change course and urgently start planning our economy, working with industry and trade unions on a sectoral basis, with targeted interventions in energy, social care, hospitality and tourism, as well as a longer-term focus on manufacturing.

The SNP’s failure to develop and implement a coherent industrial strategy is costing us dear.

This week workers will start leaving the Rolls Royce factory in Inchinnan for the last time. When the company’s decision to axe 700 jobs was announced in the first week in June, the SNP’s reactive approach was to set up a Scottish Government Rolls Royce Working Group, which the First Minister said would take a “Team Scotland approach”.

But if it was a team, it was a team that didn’t include the players because, extraordinarily, the working group co-chaired by a Scottish Government official and a Rolls Royce boss based in London did not include one single shop-floor worker or trade union representative.

In Parliament last week I asked the First Minister about the concerns of Unite convener Tam Mitchell, who was protesting outside, that the Scottish Government has simply written off jobs in the crucial maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) division at Inchinnan.

The First Minister did not deny this, saying “demand for MRO services has plummeted”. No-one is saying that the Scottish Government has a magic wand, but the working women and men at Inchinnan are rightly angry that no fight has been put up, no alternatives explored, no diversification considered and that they were not told the truth that this was the SNP Government’s stance all along.

This latest example of de-industrialisation is about much more than the future of a state-of-the-art factory. Around 700 manufacturing jobs will remain at Inchinnan as the remaining workforce continue to produce engine blades and seals on site. But the closure of the engine maintenance, repair and overhaul business and the loss of these highly skilled jobs is a big blow to what remains of our aerospace industry in Scotland.

The future of work and the future of workers is not simply an economic question – it is a test of our social priorities too.

One of the shop stewards protesting outside Parliament last week told me that this was not just about these jobs, it was about future generations. And it is about the future of the Scottish economy.

Since Covid-19 hit us and the lockdown began, we have seen a rising public expectation that the powers of governments should be deployed to help those in need, to safeguard public health, but also to safeguard jobs and the well-being of people too.

That is important because we know that unemployment strikes unequally, usually hitting the poorest and least powerful the hardest. And it hits them for the longest, too – and it now threatens to create a lost generation of workers who could feel the effects of this crisis for the rest of their lives.

So our focus in the coming months must be on retaining good jobs, and guaranteeing and creating jobs for good.

When the unemployment figures are released this week we must remember that this campaign for jobs is a battle for equality, for an end to the fear of redundancy, and it is to give people confidence that we can build a better alternative, and that real change is possible.

Richard Leonard is the leader of the Scottish Labour Party and an MSP for Central Scotland

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