Trade union members vented their ire at Scotland’s Health Minister Shona Robison as they marched through Dundee at the weekend.
Chants of “Shona do your job” were directed at SNP election campaigners by striking porters from Ninewells and Royal Victoria hospitals who believe the Health Minister should intervene in their pay dispute with National Health Service management.
They were among hundreds who gathered for the city’s Mayday March and Rally, organised each year to enable members to show solidarity with trade union colleagues across the country.
This year’s event was a particularly vocal gathering with the porters, striking Dundee University staff and representatives from the closure-threatened Fife paper firm Tullis Russell all present.
Beginning in Cowgate, they marched under police escort through the city centre, banners held aloft and chants ringing out.
Officials handed out campaign leaflets to shoppers calling all the while for a “fair wage” for Unite union porters.
They passed into the High Street where pipers Jennifer Kerr and Gordon Wallace joined them to lead the march to McManus galleries.
There, a number of speakers stepped up to a microphone to address those gathered among them Doug Chalmers of Dundee University and College Union and Paul Reilly from Tullis Russell.
Mr Chalmers told union members: “Dundee University was recently named as one of the world’s top 20 universities established in the past 50 years.
“That is an achievement to be proud of, but last week I was on the picket line with colleagues forced to defend jobs against short-term thinking and mismanagement.”
Mr Reilly of Tullis Russell, which last week went into administration with the loss of 325 jobs, said he feared that hard-working staff no longer had any rights.