Latest news with #Saramago
The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
What happened to Glasgow's CCA?
The Centre originally opened on Sauchiehall Street in the 1970s as The Third Eye Centre. A beacon for Glasgow's counterculture community, the Centre boasted performances from the likes of Billy Connolly, John Byrne, Allen Ginsberg, and Whoopi Goldberg. It played a key role in the rise of Glasgow painters like Ken Currie and Steven Campbell, as well as presenting shows from artists like Damien Hirst and Sophie Calle. The Centre for Contemporary Arts took over from the Third Eye Centre in 1991 and continued as a self-described 'forum for ideas and events' as well as 'an arts hub for the city'. The CCA held onto a closed curatorial policy until an existential crisis in 2006 when it underwent a 'profound cultural shift' and leaned into a more open-source approach to its programming. The Centre has dealt with ups and downs over the years, but the last few have exposed deeply rooted vulnerabilities that have thrown into question what shape the institution will take when it reopens. Pictures of protestors clustered outside of its doors this summer called to mind a similar scene plaguing the CCA in 2023. In March of that year, a rogue group of workers at the Saramago, a longstanding bar operating inside (but independently from) the CCA, organised a work stoppage in the middle of a bustling Friday night service. Lights were switched on, confused conversations slowly dwindled, and a chipper waitress walked around with a freshly printed off letter for customers to sign in support of their action, which was about grievances with working conditions. The dispute led to three staff being sacked on shift for breaching their contract with the 'unannounced' work stoppage, and weeks of protests outside the bar ensued. The IWW union (Industrial Workers of the World) got involved and urged the public and arts organisations to boycott Saramago. The staff members claimed they were sacked for taking part in union-endorsed strike action. Owners of Saramago claimed the majority of staff did not support the action. A spokesperson for Unite told The Herald it was aware of the dispute, but no staff were affiliated with the union. "[The IWW] is not a recognised union in the UK or affiliated with the TUC,' the spokesperson added. 'No TUC-affiliated union would endorse the action that took place as it breaks union strike guidelines." On April 21, the CCA severed its relationship with Saramago, and the cafe bar closed. Around 20 people lost their jobs. It was the first shoe to drop. Director Francis McKee, who was at the helm of the CCA for 18 years, stepped down at the end of 2023. By 2024, it was starting to become clear that the CCA was under significant pressure. The Centre announced in September that its finances were no longer viable, citing 'unprecedented' financial uncertainty. Bosses said they would close between December 2024 and March 2025 to 'focus on restructuring and ensuring financial recovery'. The reigns of the CCA had slipped from grasp, but hope emerged in January with the news that the Centre had been successful in its bid for Creative Scotland funding. The organisation was awarded £3.4 million over three years. They announced the Centre would finally reopen on April 1 and began looking for an operator to run their on-site bar and kitchen (which the CCA had been operating itself as Third Eye Bar since May 2024). The doors were only just getting used to swinging back and forth again when the CCA came under fire from AWPS. The lobby group called on the CCA to adopt a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) policy or endorse the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). The PACBI advocates for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, while endorsing BDS would mean the venue and staff publicly support a wider boycott of Israeli institutions and companies. An open letter was signed by more than 800 artists, workers, and audiences, urging the CCA to take action. The AWPS organised the week-long takeover of the CCA in June. It was intended to be a 'reclaiming' of the institution with a spontaneous five-day programme of public events, centring Palestinian liberation, Palestinian art and culture, anticolonial thought and the complicity of our arts organisations'. The 'CCA: Liberated Zone' event was meant to be held in the CCA's public courtyard and begin with an Arabic Script Workshop on Tuesday. But the CCA informed AWPS that morning that they would not be allowed in the building. 'We need as many people to mobilise at CCA at noon, to enter the building and reclaim the public courtyard so that the liberated zone can go ahead,' AWPS wrote in a callout to their Instagram followers. The CCA called the police in response to 'forced entry'. The CCA closed its doors once again. Long-term resident Aye Aye Books was caught in the crossfire and 'asked to leave' the premises after 17 years of trading (the bookshop had endorsed PACBI in January). Weeks went by before the CCA released a statement, apologising for their handling of the protest. It's ongoing challenge of recruiting permanent senior leadership has no end in sight. 'The Board had previously agreed on a period of turnaround, which would happen this year,' a spokesperson told The Herald. 'Recent events have now accelerated these plans, and we are in active discussion with our funders and other stakeholders about how we move this process forward. CCA is working towards reopening the week of August 25.' When it reopens, it will be 'without formal endorsement' of PACBI, but said it is working towards 'adopting an ethical fundraising and programming policy'. 'We condemn the violence of the Israeli state, the ongoing occupation, genocide, and the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza', the statement continued. 'We stand firmly against all forms of oppression and in support of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.' In response, AWFP acknowledged the statement as a 'vital and momentous change of direction at CCA' and heralded it as a big win. 'We expect, and demand, that CCA will formally endorse PACBI by November,' they added in a statement on Instagram. They also called for the finance manager, Steven Thomson, to be dismissed, the Interim Director of Operations, Steve Slater, to be replaced with a permanent director 'who is capable of working with the staff and the community' and the 'replacement of the Chair and the entire board'. For five months out of eight this year, the CCA has been closed. With the threadbare leadership left at the institution under such immense political pressure, it is clear that whoever takes the reins will have a tough road ahead. 'We're asking for continued support and patience as we move through this process of reflection, repair, renewal and reopening,' said a spokesperson for the CCA. 'We remain committed to rebuilding trust and ensuring that CCA continues to be a space where artists, audiences, and communities feel welcome, supported, and heard.' Marissa MacWhirter is a columnist and feature writer at The Herald, and the editor of The Glasgow Wrap. The newsletter is curated between 5-7am each morning, bringing the best of local news to your inbox each morning without ads, clickbait, or hyperbole. Oh, and it's free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1
Spectator
06-08-2025
- Business
- Spectator
How the far-left devours progressive businesses
From all over the UK I am picking up stories of employees – or more often the activists who claim to represent them – cosplaying as revolutionaries. Strikers go for progressive business owners rather than the standard capitalist bogeymen, because they are softer targets. They force them to close and then attempt to take control in the name of workers' power. They are living a fantasy. For the workers never do hijack companies. They just lose their jobs. The owners lose their businesses. The customers lose a service. Everyone loses. The closures teach a lesson that being a nice, caring liberal whose sole wish is to plan a menu around vegan pasta sauces, is not the passport to a quiet life it once was. I first heard about business hijacking when contacts in Glasgow called me in 2023 about the fate of the Saramago cafe bar at the city's Centre for Contemporary Arts. As the Tripadvisor reviews showed, people liked it. It was a cut above most of the venues on Sauchiehall Street. There were menus for vegetarians and vegans, and DJs as the night wore on. One evening, a small group of staff members shut the cafe down. They said they wanted better staffing levels, but the owners said their demands had already been met, and fired them for their 'unannounced' strike in breach of their contract. Their union, the Industrial Workers of the World, responded by demanding the reinstatement of the sacked workers – as unions have always done. There were pickets, and social media demands to boycott Saramago – nothing unusual there, either. But then the normal restrictions on union action broke down. The campaign became so intense the Centre for Contemporary Arts closed the café because the dispute was putting the 'arts programme and the wellbeing of our staff' in danger. The small group staff who had precipitated the action submitted a bid to reopen the café as a workers' cooperative. But you need capital, licences and contracts with suppliers to run a catering operation and nothing came of it. Commercial operators weren't interested either. Despite inducements from the centre's management, they backed away for fear that they would receive the same treatment as Saramago. The people who contacted me from the Centre for Contemporary Arts were appalled. The café owners were not exploitative bosses, they said, but nice people who paid decent wages and had been around the Glasgow music scene for years. They could not understand where all the aggro had come from. I do, or at least I have a working theory. Journalists at the Guardian and Observer still remember the story told by Phillip Hope-Wallace, the Guardian's great post-war critic. He recalled the despairing cry from his father when he told him he had found a job with the Guardian, 'my dear boy, never work for a liberal newspaper they will sack you on Christmas Eve.' The argument goes that because liberal companies, charities and campaign groups think themselves virtuous, they treat their workers abysmally and expect them to put up with it in the name of the greater good. I have seen that happen. But in truth businesses that profess to be left wing are more likely to be vulnerable to assault from the left than standard capitalist enterprises. They can be more easily shamed on social media as hypocrites who refuse to live up to their values. Activists can target their leftish customers, as happened to Saramago, and persuade them to go elsewhere In other words, it's easier to destroy a community, vegan-friendly café than McDonald's. In 2023, I did not know what to do with the story. I had never heard of union activists destroying a business before. Negotiators are normally very careful not to risk putting their members out of work. This is just a freak occurrence, I thought. How wrong I was. To stay in Glasgow, the Centre for Contemporary Arts is now closed. It's not just the café that is gone, everything is closed. A group calling itself Art Workers for Palestine Scotland demanded last month that the centre boycott Israel. The board said it wasn't sure it could because of its duty to be politically impartial. A protest was planned. The management locked the doors, and for the time being Glasgow has not just lost a café but an arts centre, too, not because of funding cuts demanded by evil politicians, but because of the demands of activists. How much longer arts bureaucrats can ask taxpayers to fund this shambolic centre is now a live question. The city also had a music venue called 13th Note, which promoted new acts. Unite organised a strike in 2023 over working conditions and pay. Once again, the venue closed. Once again, there was an attempt to reopen it as a workers' cooperative and once again that failed too. I am not saying the workers didn't have a case. But by the end of the dispute, they didn't have a job. Meanwhile the current issue of the Londoner carries the grimly comic story of Scarlett Letters, named after its owner Marin Scarlett. Until a few weeks ago, it was a radical, queer independent bookshop in Bethnal Green, east London. As the authors Andrew Kersley and Jack Walton tell it, trouble began with the shop's disabled toilet, which, inexplicably, was installed in an inaccessible basement. Marin Scarlett told staff: 'We have had an issue over the last few weeks of people just letting themselves downstairs to use the toilet.' In future, staff were to personally escort anyone who asked to use the loo to ensure they didn't steal stock. The problem as she saw it was that her staff were simply too kind, too feminine, too British to refuse to allow access to random strangers wandering in off the street. 'You are all extremely nice, assigned female at birth, in customer service, mostly British etc., and all of this sometimes doesn't lend itself to 'no'.' As if to prove her wrong, the staff condemned her message as 'bizarre and sexist'. They unionised and demanded secure contracts and cooperative control of the store. 'The workers are queer, trans, racialised, disabled, sex workers and students,' they said in a statement. 'Their identities have been used to advertise and fundraise for the bookshop as a radical space whilst their voices are not listened to.' Marin Scarlett improved sick pay, but pointed out that her shop did not make a profit and relied on the generosity of an anonymous backer. It couldn't carry on with this level of disruption and had to close. Scarlett was clearly mortified at being treated as an oppressive boss rather than an ally: 'The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.' Her sacked employees weren't finished, however. They occupied the building and demanded that she give them the stock so they could start a new bookshop on their own. Scarlett had to round up friends and organise a nighttime raid to pack up the books and take back control of her property. As her team tooled up, and a locksmith stood ready to change the locks, I wonder if she ever imagined that running a queer bookshop would end like this. The left is always torn by arguments between reformists and revolutionaries, and nowhere more so than now. The threat that Trump, Farage and their kind pose to liberal democracy can make people argue that you must move to the centre and do everything you can to woo waverers. It's not a shabby argument. To my mind it is obvious that the US Democrats need to junk woke ideology if they are ever to save the American republic. But doubling down is an equally human reaction to hard times. You can see it in the enthusiasm in the US for the left-wing mayoral candidate in New York Zohran in the UK you can look at resident doctors who still went on strike despite their pay increasing by 28.9 per cent across the last three years. And you can see it too in the ferocity with which workers in progressive businesses turn on their employers, and in how little they care that they may end up destroying themselves as they attempt to destroy their bosses.
Economic Times
01-06-2025
- General
- Economic Times
World in a word
Portuguese Nobel laureate in literature (1998) Jose Saramago held that words are like people - each one has its own character. This statement highlights the intricacy and uniqueness of words, drawing a fascinating parallel between them. Just as individuals possess distinct personalities, words also have word holds immense power, reflecting countless thoughts, emotions and experiences associated with it. Like people's aura, words carry weight and evoke different meanings. From gentle whisper of love to thunderous roar of anger, words can shape narratives, ignite imaginations and construct realities. Saramago's view serves as a reminder to cherish depth and diversity of languages, acknowledging its dynamic role in expressing our says, 'Kainaat ustavaar miz un lafz' - the universe is enshrined in a word. Thanks to the sacredness of every word, not just purity and piety of scriptural words, Indic thought systems believe that Akshar Brahmn is a divine reality. Hence, words must be weighed, measured and spoken with utmost care. Misuse and casual use of words may lead to an imbalance in relationships and create negative vibes. Yask's 'Nirukta', the world's first book on etymology , states that words weave us together. They can be used both as welders and flippant use of words can drive a wedge, they can also bridge gaps and gulfs. Ergo, treat every word as a character that can bring about change.
