האגודה הישראלית לחקר יחסי עבודה

be reconciled, for the good of Scottish society as a whole.
The Fair Work Convention is a classic example. Created in 2015 “to drive forward fair work in Scotland,” it is made up of grandees from unions, businesses, and third and public sectors.
In the conclusion to its March report, the authors proudly attested that in all their discussions “no-one disagreed from our starting point that fair work was something worth striving for.”
You don’t need a philosophy degree to realise everyone can commit to a value like fairness. So setting fairness as a goal is a great way to build the appearance of consensus.
But what does fair work look like? It certainly seems a tricky question, given most workers find work — the exchange of their time and effort for a wage — to be a pretty unfair deal.
Undeterred, the convention concluded that “fair work is work that offers effective voice, opportunity, security, fulfilment and respect,” offering an “overarching recommendation: that organisations deliver fair work in [these] dimensions.”
Obviously most employers will claim that they uphold this extensive list of values. Obviously most of them won’t rush to make work fair for their workers.
So union organisers are now debating what on Earth to do with this report, and with the convention.
Should organisers adopt the report’s suggested activity of “critically assessing” whether workplaces “help deliver fair work,” using it as a “framework against which employers, workers and their union representatives where present, can benchmark fair work?”
And should unions accept the report’s claim to be “the most complete description of what every working person in Scotland should be able to expect of their workplace?”
By setting value-laden targets the convention presents ethical employers, or businesses who have a business interest in “fair work,” as a gold standard.
But it has little to say about what it calls the “labour market reality” in which most employers contract workers to work for a wage that suits the bosses.
The Scottish government is canny. It posed an intractable problem in terms of a solution, and assembled a convention to gloss the question of fair work under a veneer of values.
Meanwhile the greatest unfairness lurks in the so-called labour market reality itself, which is outside the power of workers, unions and indeed the devolved Scottish government.
In Scotland at least, the question “what is fair work?” is less a tricky question than a trick question.
In response, it is surely time for union organisers to play a trick of their own.
The convention wants Scottish unions to use its “benchmark” to assess workplaces, filtering workplace issues through a set of “dimensions” that make up the Fair Work Framework.
Instead unions should illuminate the obvious, ubiquitous unfairnesses lurking in work. Analysis or “critical assessment” of fairness in the workplace will not teach us as much about the reality as shining a light on work as it’s really experienced.
Creative illumination of everyday work is something like the tactic of Better than Zero, a campaign run by young workers which exposes working conditions for those on insecure contracts.
Its website asks workers for simple descriptions of what goes on in their workplace — nothing abstract, nothing moral and no hard questions.
In exposing individual cases, Better than Zero highlights the reality of work in high streets, hotels and other haunts inhabited by employers who set terms of work however they please — notably in Sports Direct, whose appalling work practices have hit the headlines once again.Exposing the extent of abuse and exploitation in workplaces is a pessimistic strategy, and is against the grain of Scottish government attempts to reconcile workers and employers.
But successes, like the Sports Direct move to wind down their zero-hours contracts, are flashes of hope that dispel clouds of pessimism that build through any storm of industrial activity.
Scottish trade unions and their organisers could support and encourage optimistic projects to attain fairer work, but they would risk playing into the hands of those who are determined to secure consensus and harmony and gloss over the deep unfairness of work itself.
Or they can organise pessimism. And while the results will not be pretty for the consensual SNP, they will be a far better means to diagnose and cure the viruses contracted at work.
Cailean Gallagher is co-author of Roch Winds: A Treacherous Guide to the State of Scotland.

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