TRADE unionists packed the Morning Star’s Wages, Welfare and Workers’ Rights fringe meeting at the STUC Congress today.

With outgoing Labour MSP Mercedes Villalba as chairwoman, about 80 delegates gathered to hear speeches by Unison regional secretary Lilian Macer, Institute of Employment Rights director James Harrison, Labour MP Brian Leishman and Star editor Ben Chacko.

Mr Harrison said: “The government budget is a statement of values.

“We’re told welfare is unaffordable, but welfare is often just making the public pay for bad employment practices.

“Low wages, unsafe work, weak sick pay and insecure jobs, and not market efficiencies. The costs deliberately shifted from employers onto everyone else.  

“We shouldn’t be putting the economy before workers. We are the economy.”

Ms Macer warned delegates that “we can’t sleepwalk” into the Holyrood election after “the latest Scottish government budget promised at least 15,000 job cuts.”

She said: “The SNP want to shrink the public services and attack our public-sector pensions, and I have to say that it is hugely disappointing that we don’t hear anything else from any other party around this and how they would deal with things differently.”

Sharing that disappointment, Mr Leishman said: “The lack of engagement around redistribution of wealth, even entertaining the conversation of redistribution of wealth, is absolutely not where the Scottish Labour Party or the UK-wide Labour Party should be.”

Thanking delegates for backing the Star, Mr Chacko said: “We need a much more militant approach to the crisis that we’re facing,” noting the looming inflationary crisis sparked by the Iran war.

“We’re only going to be able to do that if we unite together around a publication that promotes that politics and unity across the movement — the Morning Star.”