Winds of Change

The winds of change have a smell to them.

Rex Proctor – action-figure come to life – can see the signs of how little people matter in most everything which happens in the world, but none so more blatant than in the recent industrial conflict at the Grangemouth Refinery. The management demanded the employees accept less beneficial terms and conditions to their contracts as part of the company is apparently losing ten million pounds per month. This is, indeed, a large amount of money, but Rex was interested that no-one in the media did the simple maths: the one thousand, three hundred and fifty workers would actually have to pay the company seven thousand, four hundred pounds per month to off-set this loss if the logic of the management argument was followed through. Faced with closure – an economic, world-wide, poker-playing gambit by the owner – the union capitulated, and they and the workforce were 'rewarded' with a three-hundred million pound investment.

The workers, the local community, Scotland and the world's media rejoiced.

But Rex knows that the naked truth this represents is this: when you are rich and powerful, you can generally do what the fuck you want to the people you employ in the name of profit. Smell the winds of change – that is the ordure of your worker's rights going up in flames.

 

Kolly Wobble – toy octopus come to life – cycled out and about in Suffolk to witness the damage St Jude caused locally. She suspects that if she had been there when the wind was at its height, and listened in the right way, she might just have heard the trees screaming.

The countryside is in a permanent state of flux – moving to rhythms dictated by nature and influenced by agriculture – but abrupt change caused by trauma is never pleasant to experience. To see a tree uprooted, knowing it is still living, caused her a pain she didn't realise she was capable of.

In some ways, Rex tells, her it is a bit like the many workers in history who stood up to be counted – demanding a little decency, putting down the roots of a better life for their children – only to find those conditions exposed by some unseen capricious force.

Smell the winds of change – it is the wood smoke of screaming trees.   

 

Try not to do the stupid things stupid people do.