A trade union will urge SNP Finance Secretary Derek Mackay to back a funding boost for Glasgow council following claims the city is close to going bust.

The GMB will use a meeting with Mackay to make a special case for Scotland’s largest city to get more cash, which could include a demand for hundreds of millions of pounds.

Union organiser Rhea Wolfson said: “We will use this opportunity to ask the Finance Minister for interventions that tackle the chronic decline of Glasgow and the unique challenges it’s facing over the next few years.”

Pressure on council budgets has been particularly acute in Glasgow, which critics say has lost out on around £300m since 2007.

The council’s botched handling of the £548m equal pay row has also hit the city in the pocket.

In order to meet the bill, the local authority has taken out loans against assets such as the Emirates Arena and Scotstoun Stadium and committed to making repayments over the next few decades.

Further equal pay claims could land the council with another liability.

City Property Glasgow, a wholly owned subsidiary of the council, agreed a £166m, 30-year loan deal with Canada Life Investments. It followed a similar deal

with Legal & General earlier this year for a loan of £285m.

These financial challenges recently prompted GMB Scotland leader Gary Smith to argue that the funding situation in Glasgow is unsustainable.

He said: “It feels like a city that is in decline. We’ve got public buildings in a state of decay - the Mitchell Library, the problems with the People’s Palace - the streets are absolutely filthy and we’ve got an epidemic of rats in large parts of the city.

“Too often the politicians are happy to hide behind this bluff and bluster about ‘people make Glasgow’. The people of Glasgow deserve better than they are getting.”

He said he feared Glasgow could become like a US city that effectively went bankrupt: "It could be Detroit without the soundtrack."

Smith added: “One of the fundamental reasons why devolution is not delivering is that it was supposed to rebalance the economy. I don’t see any evidence that that is happening, particularly in the west coast of Scotland.

“There is no way the Scottish Government can keep burying its head in the sand with the state and the decline of Glasgow.”

The row will flare up at a meeting tomorrow between the unions and Mackay. The GMB will issue a call for Glasgow’s funding to be overhauled.

Wolfson said ahead of the summit: “It’s a fact the existing local government budget formula is broken and in urgent need of reform. Nothing confirms this more than Glasgow and it’s illustrated in the evident decay across the city; mounting rubbish, pit stop care, pot-holed roads and derelict green spaces.

"But it’s also a hard truth for the Scottish Government that the budget formula has badly short changed Glasgow since 2007 and no other city in Scotland has been hit harder by austerity. This simply cannot continue unchallenged."

A video of a Glasgow bin man filming the difficult working conditions of refuse workers went viral last month, fuelling calls for a funding rethink.

In a Facebook clip, Chris Mitchell could be seen standing next to a bunch of black bags and rubbish piled high in a shed in Maryhill.

He said: "This is the type of kind of stuff that we have to endure every single day as Glasgow City Council refuse collection workers.

"Glasgow is a unique place within the refuge collection world, there is no other place in Europe that participates in the way we carry out a refuge collection function.

"We are probably the lowest paid in Scotland, the lowest grade, we do the hardest job.

"Today I'm highlighting this. I'm urging, I'm really urging Glasgow City Council and Holyrood to release funds to this understaffed and under-resourced service. This is really at crisis point now. I'm begging you."

Labour MP Paul Sweeney said: "The Scottish Government should act immediately to address the funding crisis they have imposed on our city's services by reviewing the overall financial capacity needed to run a massive and complex city like Glasgow."

A Glasgow council spokesman said: "The leader of the council has always been very clear that Glasgow's equal pay problem would be resolved by the city.

"Since the beginning of this year, we have agreed a deal; paid hundreds of millions of pounds to settle tens of thousands of claims, and have a financial strategy in place that minimises the impact on day-to-day budgets."

A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “While we welcome that women in Glasgow will get the money they were denied for too long, we are clear that Glasgow City Council, like all local authorities, are responsible for managing their resources effectively and this includes the costs of equal pay claims.

“Glasgow City Council will receive over £1.4 billion to fund local services in 2019-20, which taken with the council’s decision to increase council tax by 3%, means an additional £67 million (4.8%) to support the delivery of essential local services compared to 2018-19.”