THE Covid pandemic lifted the veil on the millions of low-paid workers who keep the country running. It was a brief opportunity for these people, often poor and isolated, to recognise themselves as a workforce, and to organise.
 
One result has been the Fair Hospitality Charter, an initiative of Unite, that calls for employers and workers to agree a minimum set of conditions, namely: a real living wage (£8.45 an hour), rest breaks, equal pay for young workers, paid transport after midnight, policies that stamp out sexual harassment, a minimum hours contract, 100 per cent tips to staff, consultation on rotas and unfettered union access to represent and organise staff.

To support and publicise this initiative, the ethical Glasgow-based production company Fair Pley will deliver a “cabaret of dangerous ideas” featuring stars of spoken word and music on Sunday June 19 (tomorrow) at Southside Community Centre, Edinburgh.

It promises to be a brilliant evening of entertainment with some of Scotland’s finest talent.

The target is the Edinburgh Festival because, says singer Calum Baird: “The festival is the loose brick in the wall. These issues are present all the year round but during the festival people can see them more clearly. At that moment the profits of corporations, bars and landlords are immense and the treatment of workers is at its worst.”

For Baird, collaboration with Unite is the key because it can demonstrate to unions the power of culture as a spokesman for workers’ rights and conditions, and also break down barriers between artists and the trade union movement. “We want to use culture to change the culture,” he says.

Acclaimed singer Louis Rive, also on Sunday’s bill, agrees: “The festival operates at the expense of those who work for it at ground level,” he says. “Illegal shift patterns, sub-standard wages and a total lack of regard for the wellbeing of staff has sadly become an accepted fact. Corporate interest will never recognise the toil of fringe workers. It is an artist’s responsibility to stand side by side with comrades in the hospitality sector.”

This event is a template for the kind of exchange between artists and unions that can raise awareness and help to organise, that are becoming, day by day, an urgent necessity throughout the UK.

In the words of the poet Rosa Moxham, herself a hospitality worker, and also part of Sunday night’s line-up: “I feel like a sticky sweaty icky smelly mess / Serving guys and gals once dressed to impress / But now their glad-rags are covered in dregs / of their Friday night…/ Aye, you’ve sussed it. That’s right. / I’m on the nightshift at Macdonalds.”

Fair Fringe Now – music, poetry and organising with Unite the Union! Tomorrow, 7.30 pm, Southside Community Centre Edinburgh.Tickets: mstar.link/FairFringe.