I WOBBLED at the top of a 5m ladder with a tin of white paint dangling alongside me, paint brush in hand and an elderly woman pulling faces through the window.

“How did I get here?”

Jimmy held on to the foot of the ladder. I had known him for all of a week since we moved into the “upper cottage” of the four-in-a-block next door. Within hours of arriving, we’d noticed Lily waving from her kitchen window opposite ours, pulling faces and laughing.

They had lived there for decades, with an immaculate patch of garden wired with a bell to call Jimmy in for his tea. It was curiosity about this that got us talking, and me roped into painting the frames of the windows he had made in a shipyard that no longer existed.

Jimmy had grown up in Elder Street in Govan, around the corner from where we had just moved from, where the horn calling for breaks at Fairfields — now BAE — still punctuates the day. He had worked in Alexander Stephens along the road in Linthouse though, a carpenter — “not a joiner!” — all his days.

We sat down on his bench in the garden and he told me all about it, effortlessly pausing and restarting in time with the trains passing a few yards away. He had taken retirement just after the work-in at UCS. “You’ve been retired 30 years?!” A hard thing for a 28 year-old me to comprehend.

It turns out that he and Lily were both into their nineties, though you’d never have known it. Always out and about and up for a laugh. I used to offer to take their bins out, but Jimmy would have none of it, so instead we’d have a gab. One morning, he appeared with blood on his forehead. He’d tripped on a slab. We got him upstairs and all seemed well.

Within a few days he’d developed a cough that wouldn’t shift. A week or so later, he was in hospital. Six weeks later, he had gone. At the age of 96, more than three decades after leaving paid work, asbestos had got him.

Like thousands of others in the yards, particularly carpenters, he’d regularly got covered in the stuff over the years, long after its dangers were known to employers. Few were lucky enough to have the healthy and long life he had though.

My grandpa had had issues with his lungs. From being a champion racing cyclist just after the war, he had to restrict himself to the motorised kind after he had burned his lungs at work.

He’d been instructed to test a new type of welding rod in a space that was — unbeknownst to him — sealed as he entered. He spent a year in hospital, before deciding he didn’t want to die there and signing himself out. Convinced he had eaten himself back to fitness, he went back to work, inhaler in hand, for another 20 years to support his family, picking up vibration white finger for his troubles.

By the late ’90s, the New Labour government had started the long process to give compensation to thousands who had worked in the mining industry. I drove my grandpa along to the assessment centre. “I’m sure you will qualify for an interim payment, Mr Walker”, the doctor told us, before adding the verbal pat on the head: “It might take a while, but don’t worry, it will be paid to your family if you’re not around.”

Maybe he meant well as he turned to me with a reassuring smile, but it was all I could do not launch a fist through it.

Over the next few days at events all over the earth, working people will gather together to remember the dead and resolve to fight for the living. Stories like the couple I have just shared, and far, far, worse will abound and we will collectively recoil at the horrors inflicted on our class since class was born.

On the eve of Glasgow’s commemoration on the Green, trade unionists gathered in a Calton pub on Thursday night for the launch of the Glasgow Trades Union Council’s May Day Programme.

Almost three weeks of events — ranging from film screenings to football matches, workshops to walking tours, and from gigs to the march itself on May 4 — will take a very different tone to that being pushed by the official Glasgow 850 birthday party.

Co-opting the city council’s “People Make Glasgow” slogan, the GTUC proclaims that “Workers Built Glasgow” — and so they did.

They built much else besides. Like most industrial cities we can point to things like the great locomotives dispersed to every continent to travel on the Lanarkshire steel that girdled this earth. We can and should be proud of those things — even the mainstream history will play that game.

Too often, though, we are told that workers were to blame for the decline — “militancy,” “intransigence,” all that guff. UCS can be portrayed as a great moment in the mainstream, but is often patted on the head as a “vibe” and not the concerted attempt by workers — after decades of working-class self-education — to wrest control of their destiny not just from the capitalist but from the patrician.

A short walk from where the GTUC had its launch on Thursday, six Calton Weavers were murdered in 1787 for that very crime. They refused to be driven into the dirt, refused to be poor, but their reason was not met with argument. Instead, it was met with the volleys of musket-fire of the 39th Regiment.

Examples around the earth, not least in the farmers’ strikes in India in recent years, tell us how little has actually changed.

We may be lucky enough not to be shot on a picket in this country these days, but as many a veteran of the great miners’ strike will tell you, capital is still more than happy to deploy troops against workers — even if they have to play dress-up as police.

One constant remains over those two centuries though, the working-class families continue to lose their loved ones for the price of labour.

A more stark example than that of the 1889 disaster at the Templeton carpet factory at Glasgow Green would be hard to find. Twenty-nine young women queuing to collect their wages were killed when a wall at the factory — under construction to mimic the Doge’s Palace in Venice — collapsed.

The Templeton family clearly thought nothing of spending the extra money to construct what was — and still is — a remarkable building. Unfortunately they also thought so little of their workers that compensation amounted to bibles being presented to families with their dead loved-one’s name on it.

What a comfort it must have been as the hunger pangs kicked in to read how the meek shall inherit the earth.

These days, their families would no doubt be in line for actual compensation, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who lost someone they loved who wouldn’t exchange a payout to have them back.

My anger as I sat with my grandpa refuses to leave me.

By the time a payment came through, the blacksmith couldn’t live his dream of seeing the Eiffel Tower in the flesh. Too ill, too late.

There are only two things that stand between workers and the musket’s volley today — the ballot and the union.

Experience tells us, though, that their mere existence is not enough.

Remembering the dead and fighting for the living cannot exist in the abstract, it cannot be contained to a day, or the social media post — it is the way of life.

Bring it to life in your community, in your workplace, and in your union — they need you.

Bring them to life and the future is ours.