I FIRST heard of Scotland’s gold rush back in March. In the shop in Blackford village in Perthshire, stocking up before a night’s camping up Gleneagles, I overheard the shopkeeper talking to a customer in front of me about how they ought to get a jack for levering up some stones to get to the water underneath. 

After the customer left, I asked what they were up to.

“Gold-panning,” the shopkeeper said. “Oh?” I said, “In Gleneagles?”

“Aye, and in Glendevon. Folk have started again. It hasn’t really been done here since the last depression.”

Those who regard gold-panning as a money-grabbing habit of the idle classes reveal nothing but their own preoccupations, since every gold-panner knows the money is meagre unless you are exceptionally lucky. 

The gold is valued more for beauty than for bounty. Folk are using the free time provided by the pandemic to sift for gifts to give the people they love.

Meanwhile, Scotland’s first gold mine for many years has recently got going at Cononish in the Trossachs (designated an area of outstanding natural beauty). 

Its chief executive, Richard Gray, told the Irish Times that they are “going to make very good money out of it.” 

Most of its profits will line the pockets of Nat le Roux, the Scottish-born non-executive director of Scotgold who owns 40 per cent of the company. 

When he is not involved in financial speculation, le Roux is to be found lamenting “the over-representation of democratic legitimacy as the dominant contemporary political virtue.”

In spite of le Roux’s fears of Scottish independence, the Scottish government has subsidised the company’s share value. 

Scotgold’s annual report explains, with a little bemusement, that Scottish Enterprise gave it a handout of £430,000 because the company operates in areas designated as “deprived.”

Scotland has a long history of putting folk down mines. Early in the 1700s, not far from Gleneagles, Sir John Erskine of Alva ran a silver mine. 

Unlike le Roux, Erskine tried to topple the British crown by joining the 1715 Jacobite rising, and so the government didn’t smile upon him but instead halted production at the mine.

In those days, many miners at Alva knew little or nothing about the value they pulled up. 

As one visitor remarked: “The ore was dug by three or fower of Sir Johns pore tenants that did not know what it wass.” 

In generations that followed, miners began to develop skills and knowledge, as well as collective initiative and ways of organising to oversee their work.

Scotgold is currently recruiting 20-odd workers (deadline January 31), who will have to be trained on the job.

The workers who gain these skills will know if they consult the tables in the company’s records, that the anticipated life of the mine is nine years, during which time approximately 176,000 ounces of gold will be produced. 

They will know that the all-in cost of the mine is £461 per ounce. Gold sells for about £1,400 an ounce, so they will know that this amounts to a rough profit of £165,264,000 before tax, give or take a few millions for unanticipated natural or industrial troubles. 

Some say that data is the raw material of the modern world, and that mining data is like mining ore. 

Twenty twenty has been a bonanza year for data companies and platforms, especially given the surge in food delivery. 

When riders go out into the city on deliveries, they send big chunks of data up to platforms. 

The information that platforms extract from this ore is a more important source of value and profits than payments from deliveries. 

Data is like gold, and yet quite often workers in the platform economy are not fully aware of the value created by the data they generate.

Does it change anything about workers’ control if they know the value of what they produce and does it help to know the extent of a company’s projected profits? 

Is it other knowledge about production processes that matter, or in the labour market does workers’ knowledge not matter at all? 

The question of what is known, what is unknown and what could or should be known by workers is as old as the labour movement. 

The Workers’ Observatory has been established by gig workers to explore these questions, backed by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and researchers at Edinburgh University. 

It took years of initiative and reverse monitoring for miners to develop methods of revealing and resisting the discipline they work under, and it will take energy and experimentation for platform workers to do the same. 

The initiative and inventiveness of workers and unions will determine whether it happens in this depression of today.