Wraparound services should be a right for all workers

The Scotsman reports today that Scottish civil servants are protesting the closure of the in-house childcare services saying that it will have a big impact on staff who face inadequate provision of services elsewhere, with alternative nurseries experiencing long waiting lists, not to mention that this will mean that parents will be separated further from their children should an incident occur.

The Government stated that the closure of the nursery is due to a failure of the tender process with the sole bidder withdrawing their bid.

This comes after John Swinney suggested (without evidence) that increasing the Scottish Child Payment would discourage mothers from re-entering the workforce but we would suggest that the barriers against parents working are much higher than merely money such as the lack of childcare provision.

Even for workers without such issues, barriers to work can include things like lack of access to housing (this is particularly acute in the Highlands and Islands where tourist and even healthcare services are constrained because hotels and health clinics cannot hire staff because the staff cannot find adequate housing.

All workplaces, including but not limited to Government workplaces, must better recognise that their staff are not just economic units that clock in, increase GDP, then clock out. If workers are to sell their time to their employer, then the employer has to recognise the cost of that time is not met just with money (even if their workers are adequately paid, which many are not).

Common Weal has called for better wraparound care for workers within jobs and while this will look different for different jobs and in different areas it may include policies like better support for on-site child care, or it may include tied housing for workers in areas where housing provision is stressed, or it may even include better support for food provision in workplace canteens to ensure that workers are adequately fed (just as we recognise that inadequate food is a primary cause of inequality for children in schools). This last point is particularly important for many shift workers who find that their access to services available for day shift colleagues are drastically curtailed during the night shift.

Our book Sorted goes in more detail on how a sense of “Place” affects not just people’s homes, but their communities and even their workplaces so that policies aimed one aspect must be measured against the impact more broadly and with a more cohesive vision for what they mean for all of us.