When I first started at James Watt College — years before the 2013 merger that turned it into West College Scotland with Reid Kerr and Clydebank — I expected the usual settling-in nonsense: paperwork, training, learning the ropes. What I didn’t expect was to be told, by the person supposedly representing me, that I was basically worth peanuts.
Enter the UNISON rep. A man so sharp he could cut himself on a sponge. His grand assessment? That I was on minimum wage because I “came from the council.” Never mind that I hadn’t. Never mind that it was Enable Services Scotland who actually got me the job. No, he was convinced — and apparently, that was good enough to override both logic and fact.
Here’s the thing: if he’d taken two minutes out of his busy schedule of making assumptions, he’d have realised I should’ve started on the college’s pay scale, not shoved onto minimum wage like I was a spare part. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of a good guess?
So there I was, doing a proper salaried college role while being paid as if I was just fetching the chalk. Because the rep — the guy whose one actual job is to protect workers from being underpaid — decided to wing it. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
The stress, the frustration, the months of being undervalued — all of it could have been avoided if this “representative” had engaged brain before opening mouth. But instead, I got lumbered with someone who, to put it bluntly, was an absolute idiot.
James Watt College may have disappeared into the history books when West College Scotland was created in 2013, but the memory of that fiasco stuck with me. Not because management screwed me over — but because the person who was supposed to fight for me managed to trip over his own assumptions and drag me down with him. Some rep, eh?
And in the end? He didn’t even last long at the college. Not long after this incident, he was gone. Maybe someone else got tired of his “guesswork approach” too.
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