Of course I understand why The Toilet Cleaner gets paid less than The Managing Director, though I’m not sure it’s justified in any decent way.
For, after all, where would our hospitals and schools and streets and care homes and cafes and workplaces be without someone to clean the floors or wipe the tables or answer the phone or put the rubbish away or the thousand and one other thankless and endless tasks on which our world depends?
I’ve done a variety of jobs in my own lifetime, from starting as a 14-year-old peeling the tatties in Onorio di Ciacca’s fish and chip shop in Oban, graduating on to being a kitchen porter in the Great Western Hotel, a bottle washer in McCall’s lemonade factory, a lobster fisherman off Luing and Scarba, a plasterer’s labourer, and then to planting trees with the Forestry Commission.
After that, a spell as Secretary of the Uist Council of Social Services, journalist with the West Highland Free Press, station assistant with Radio Highland, news presenter and programme editor with Grampian Television, columnist with The Guardian, Herald, Scotsman, WHFP and now the famous P & J, and an actor, with a starring role, a Scottish BAFTA nomination and a month-long run Off-Broadway, where the great actor Bill Murray called in one night and praised the performance.
I mention all that stuff so as to diminish it. Because none of these jobs were 1% as important as the job my Mam did, raising seven of us without the benefits of electricity or running water. Or the jobs she then did when we moved to Oban, as a housemaid in the various hotels, and peeling the prawns in the local fish factory.
Or, to include my Dad in the various labours, the way he built all those croft-houses in South Uist, even though the crofters who received a handsome government grant for these very houses always paid him slowly and lowly. Which meant he took off to the mainland as an itinerant joiner and builder, literally working his heart out at various sites throughout Scotland for decades.
Why should more qualifications mean more money?
I suppose that personal experience has rooted my belief in the fundamental importance and dignity of labour and the scandalous way in which that essential labour is unrewarded. I know it’s a global problem, so let’s all be aware of where the food we eat or the socks we wear or the coffee we drink come from. Is it produced cheaply by more-or-less slave labour in apalling conditions?
If I had my way, everyone would be paid equally. Ah, but the argument goes, that would get rid of all enterprise and ambition and progress
That indignity works much closer to home as well. We all know the arguments that justify exploitation and inequality, though that doesn’t pardon them. That the higher your qualifications are, or the more responsibility you have, the higher your reward or wages ought to be.
Tell that to the PhD graduate now working as a barmaid down the local pub. Or to the joiner whose five-year apprenticeship took more sweat than any degree. Or to the janitor or care worker or class assistant or shelf filler without whom the school or care home or supermarket couldn’t function.
Pay the doorperson at Holyrood the same as the first minister
If I had my way, everyone would be paid equally. Ah, but the argument goes, that would get rid of all enterprise and ambition and progress. If the toilet cleaner gets paid the same wage as the managing director, her ambition would go all to pot! She would lose all desire to improve herself, make progress, ascend the greasy ladder to the ultimate nirvana of a company Mondeo with a personalised number plate…
Nonsense. For the simple reason that, even if the song claims that money makes the world go round, it’s not everything. Folk work for other reasons. Most (whether directors or cleaners) simply to put bread on the table, but also for other, greater reasons: to do a job well, to help others, for the communal good, to improve lives, for using their skills, to pass the time, and so on and so forth. In these more altruistic fields, everyone is equal.
Which is why the pie should be equally divided. Instead of “The Boss” getting ceann reamhar na maraig (the fat end of the pudding), give the worker of “lowest status” an equal share of the marag.
Pay the cleaner the same wage as the head teacher, the doorperson at Holyrood the same as the first minister. A poet the same wage as a politician. That’s £64,470 per annum in Edinburgh at the moment, by the way. Or £81,932 in London.
Though I’m not sure it would do much good. As Shakespeare put it: “How quickly nature falls into revolt when gold becomes her object”.
Angus Peter Campbell is an award-winning writer and actor from Uist
