At the height of Clyde shipbuilding, those working in the shipyards and docks did so in exploitative and dangerous conditions that we might find it hard to imagine today. There was little in the way of health and safety and perhaps the gritty, warts and all reality was nothing like the romanticised image we hold of the halcyon days of Clyde shipbuilding.
The CDPI would set out that all staff and tenants’ employees working in a heritage park would be paid at least the living wage while encouraging a standard 30 hour working week. The intention is to both challenge conventional working practices and demonstrate that a shift in work life balance is in the long term beneficial for employees, employers and for society. The position of the CDPI is that social enterprise and micro enterprise is the best way to achieve this in the face of accelerating globalisation that many governments are not only failing to tackle but are actively and willfully facilitating. With the UK government seemingly intent on reversing decades of social democratic progress (almost to pre-WWII standards) it is incumbent upon organisations that are willing to adopt strong ethical principes to mitigate this and upon their customers/patrons to demand that they do.
Our aim is to act as a facilitator for a more modern approach – taking example from the kind of informal, collaborative working structures that exist in creative/tech industries, where hierarchical management is largely eliminated and teams are fluid – and applying the same principles to the heritage sector.
In the wider economy we are seeing a trend of decline in the demand for labour on a global scale and at the same time unprecedented population growth. We are also consuming natural resources at an unsustainable rate that can only be redressed by scaling back of consumer economic activity and drastic reduction of things like planned [product] obsolesence. All organisations will eventually have to address how they will play a role in dealing with this and CDPI aims to do so from the outset.
We aim for a heritage park at Govan graving docks to be a carbon-neutral development, to recycle as much as possible and to encourage any food outlet franchises in the park to use as much local and seasonal produce as is practical.
CDPI Blog 