Earlier this month, on Saturday 4 August, the Edinburgh Central branch of the RCP embarked on our ‘Reclaim the Fringe’ campaign.
The Fringe is the world’s largest performance arts festival. It takes place in Edinburgh every August, providing landlords and big production companies with the opportunity to make millions. Performers, support staff, and hospitality and service workers, meanwhile, barely scrape by.
We thought we’d try our luck with this campaign, to see if there is a mood for revolutionary demands around the festival.
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One famously precarious aspect of the Fringe is that young people are paid peanuts to stand on the streets and hand out leaflets to convince passersby to attend various shows. This was perfect for our intervention, as we also had leaflets of our own to distribute!
The plan was to go around the busiest areas, take the flyers from these workers, and offer them our flyer in return. In this way, we would start conversations about the Fringe, in order to raise our programme and perspectives.
The reception for our ideas was astounding. Many agreed with our demands for a £20 minimum wage, and for workers’ and community control of the festival.
At the same time we had a stall in the city centre, where we sold 12 papers and met three people interested in joining the RCP.
One of these was part of a theatre group that is producing a play about starting a revolution. The main actor came up to our stall in his Che Gevara shirt and beret, and asked for a picture with The Communist!
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It was very helpful to have a page in the recent issue of the paper about the Fringe, including analysis and letters about the issues facing festival workers and local residents.
This great start to the campaign gave us a lot of ideas and enthusiasm, confirming the mood of discontent towards the capitalists and landlords in Edinburgh, which we can tap into.
Our next target is the main university campus, where many of the leafleting workers are based, which is transformed during the Fringe into a massive money-making, super-exploitative space.
Rubbish! Edinburgh bin strikes called off again
Shaun Morris
Local government strikes – that could have resulted in rubbish piling up in Scotland’s streets have been called off, after a last-minute pay deal offered by council bosses and the Scottish government.
A walkout by bin workers would have hit Edinburgh particularly hard during the Fringe Festival.
In a repeat of previous years, union negotiators spent months saying that there must be a strike to break the deadlock and get more money on the table. GMB held a series of workplace meetings to rally its members in cleansing and refuse collection.
Ultimately, negotiators were saved from having to carry out their threats by the intervention of the Scottish government, desperate to avoid a calamity at the Fringe.
The proposed eight-day strike – initially scheduled to start today, 14 August – has therefore been suspended by Unite, Unison, and GMB while they ballot their members on the offer.
Like last time, Unite and GMB are recommending acceptance of the modest deal, calling it “credible” and “substantial”. Unison recommends rejection, meanwhile, noting that local government workers have suffered a 25 percent drop in pay since 2014.
Should there be even a slight recession, as seems likely, what little has been gained this year will be wiped out. The Scottish government also warns that the £77.5 million coughed up for this deal will mean more cuts to public services.
The Scottish government, like Starmer’s Labour or the Tories before them, expect workers divided by sector or by union to fight over scraps like this. And the union leaders seem more than happy to oblige, using their members like pawns as they conduct closed-door negotiations.
The alternative to this is a united response from the union movement – to take the fight to the government and show serious opposition to years of austerity measures.
This requires a strategy and perspective based on class struggle and working-class power.
