NEXT week sees the start of Challenge Poverty Week co-ordinated by the Scottish Poverty Alliance. Their key message is that “as we plan our economic recovery, we must redesign our economy to reflect the values of justice and compassion we all share.”

This reflects the view, widely held among Scotland’s civil society and campaigning organisations, that recovery must not mean going back to the place we were before the pandemic.

That place is a Scotland where the two richest families now have as much wealth as the poorest 20 per cent of the population, while Scotland’s richest twenty families are wealthier than the bottom 30 per cent of the population combined. Low pay is endemic and work is insecure for hundreds of thousands of people.

Some 619,000 households live in fuel poverty including 279,000 households living in extreme fuel poverty.

The pandemic is exacerbating this perilous situation. Coronavirus may not technically discriminate on the lines of class — but its effects are clearly exacerbated by imbalances of income, wealth and power.

One of the ironies of Scotland’s unjust society is that essential workers can barely afford essentials. Despite boasting of having spent £160 billion this year to stem the jobs crisis, it is obvious that the Tories consider such spending a necessary evil.

Last week’s additional £3.6 billion over six months may well save some jobs, but it is clear the Chancellor’s heart is not really in it. He dithered for too long in the summer, sparking redundancies in many sectors of the economy.

When the scheme was finally announced, the expectation that employers will routinely stump up additional monies to pay for workers to stay at home ignores the precarious nature of so many employment contracts and the zero-hours and fire-and-rehire culture particularly prevalent in the sectors it is trying to help.

Some £3.6 billion may sound like a hefty sum, but it is in all truth small beer compared to the challenges we face.

Even if Rishi Sunak’s sticking plaster announcement of last week was of the scale required to safeguard enough jobs — maybe closer to the German Kurzarbeit scheme — it would still be far less than half of the picture.

Acting to retain these low-paid jobs in the service sector may be necessary, but it is no way to organise an economy. Sunak was wrong not to bring forward a budget alongside his emergency job support package and it should have been a budget to create new, good quality jobs.

This week the STUC is publishing “The People’s Recovery: A new track for the Scottish economy.” The paper combines short-term measures to rebuild our economy with medium and longer-term measures to create a democratic and green economy and a society in which workers and their families have fair work, decent housing and a proper safety net.

It calls for a fundamental rethink on the purposes of growth and the introduction of urgent measures such as a National Care Service, a green stimulus package, sectoral collective bargaining and democratic public ownership.

Given that the private sector has shown itself to be woefully inadequate to meet the challenge of the crisis, government intervention is at the heart of our proposals.

A number of our proposals clearly require government to borrow to invest and for a decisive move towards more wealth taxes and progressive taxation to fund public services and pay increases.

Our research reveals that investing £13 billion over two years in clean transport and clean infrastructure would create over 140,000 jobs in Scotland. £13 billion is a very significant sum of money, but it is spending that would come with massive medium and long-term economic rewards as well as making a significant contribution to tackling greenhouse gas emissions.

However, many of our other policy proposals would save money by taking back the profits and asset building inherent in private-sector delivery and the failed financialised capitalist model.

A Scottish national care service would see public money recycled into better care and into decent pay for careworkers.

A national Scottish construction company would break with the model which saw Carillion collapse at a cost to the taxpayer of £148 million and with the loss of thousands of jobs.

Scottish households are currently subsidising energy companies to scatter jobs around the world rather than support local supply chains which would provide good quality jobs with knock-on revenue benefits for the exchequer.

Equally, finance is currently being drained out of local economies by corporations. Local councils lack the powers, the finance and all too often the will, to commit to community wealth building.

Community wealth building would involve an expanded role for public-sector investment, under the collective guidance of local communities.

Fair work, progressive procurement and the socially productive use of land and property could be institutionalised.

The Youth Guarantee, in large part aimed at creating new jobs for young people, could be tied to local authority led public works programmes.

Fully implementing the programme laid out by us in The People’s Recovery would require concerted action by governments north and south of the border and, even then, it would not happen overnight.

But action can start now to put us on a different track, by taking action to combat Scotland’s renewables jobs crisis, moving to national collective bargaining in key sectors such as care and implementing a decent pay rise for workers. As we move towards next year’s Scottish Parliament elections these are the some of the key issues we will be campaigning on.

Roz Foyer is general secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress.