It's great to see that the distilleries at Brora and Port Ellen are to re-open, although it certainly won't mean as many new jobs as the Scottish press seem to think. Whisky production is pretty automated and has been for a long time now. But more worrying is whether the current boom can be sustained.
People who live in the whisky-producing areas of Scotland have already had the experience of 'boom and bust' and are right to be suspicious that the current boom in alcohol production (whisky, gin, beer) won't last. I especially fear for all our futures in the time of Brexit.
This is how it was in the time of Thatcher in the 1980s, as described by the wife of a distillery worker. The distillery X was working in closed and he was made redundant and sent off with £1,000 in his pocket.
"He managed after a while to get a job with the Manpower services scheme working at the old school house in Port Charlotte. He walked there and back every day. It was winter and one night his torch failed coming up the road so he walked the Bunnahabhain road home with one leg in the ditch most of the way so he knew he was still on the road and not heading for the sea!
For around £40 a week, a couple of pounds more than what we got on the "dole" But he was working. He couldn't cope with just sitting around the house. The £1,000 redundancy didn't go far yet was a lot of money back then.
It was a happy day when the knock came on the door asking if he wanted his old job back in the distillery.
This is his 40th year at Bunnahabhain. It will be a year next month since we had to move out because the village is being demolished. But as much as I am a Bowmore girl born and bred and love our cosy wee house here, Bunnahabhain will always be home."
In rural areas, the closure of an industry means more than just a few jobs: rural Scotland is littered with the ruins of villages and townships that flourished on the back of a single industry like flax mills and lime kilns. Sustaining the population of rural areas is very difficult.
If you trace your family tree back, as I've done to 1851, you find that working people were constantly on the move. My family moved from Ayrshire to Leith and then to Glasgow - in pursuit of work - in just 20 years.
And these days it's not just rural areas. I'm quite sure Kilmarnock people (substitute the name of any small town - Paisley, Alloa, Motherwell - remember when their town was prosperous - in fact, rich. People worked in engineering, carpet-making, shoe production and so on. But these industries are long gone and they're not coming back.
How do we secure the future for our kids? We can't. What we can do is make sure that our kids are educated, trained, skilled up and ready to do what X did - move to another job at the drop of the proverbial hat. And we need to stop listening to Tory politicians who make out it's the fault of workers that they can't get work.
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