29th June, 2015<\/p>\n
Assurances required for CalMac workforce<\/strong><\/p>\n The last thing any worker wants to do is go on strike. The prospect of days or weeks without pay is a daunting one, particularly when there are bills to pay and a family to provide for.<\/p>\n Furthermore, no worker wants to cause inconvenience to the public or be put in the firing line.<\/p>\n However, speaking from experience as a former trade union official, there are times when there is no choice but to take industrial action.<\/p>\n This is certainly true of the CalMac workforce 200 of whom are employed at the headquarters in Gourock.<\/p>\n For over two years now, they have been seeking assurances regarding safe staffing levels, protection of services and pensions, yet no such assurances have been forthcoming.<\/p>\n The reason for their concerns is that CalMac services are being put out to tender and may be privatised as a result of one of the companies who is looking to secure the takeover.<\/p>\n Last week in Parliament I backed calls for the concerns of the workforce to be fully addressed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unacceptable that they have been left in the lurch for so long, particularly when you consider that they play a vital role in maintaining essential lifeline services to Scotland\u2019s Western Islands.<\/p>\n I\u2019m also supporting calls for CalMac services to remain within the public sector in order to provide protection and certainty for the workforce, passengers and tax payers.<\/p>\n I sincerely hope that the Scottish Government\u2019s Transport Minister and Inverclyde MSP Derek Mackay, will listen to the many voices urging him to resist the temptation of the short-term savings that privatisation seems to offer.<\/p>\n Instead, he should come down on the side of the workers and the Inverclyde economy which would suffer if 200 jobs were to go at CalMac headquarters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 29th June, 2015 Assurances required for CalMac workforce The last thing any worker wants to do is go on strike. The prospect of days or weeks without pay is a daunting one, particularly when there are bills to pay and a family to provide for. Furthermore, no worker wants to cause inconvenience to the public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holyrood-message"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1318"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1337,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions\/1337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/duncanmcneil.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}