The agony of labour

In case you hadn’t noticed, it was Labour Day last Saturday. A stark Rishi Ragoonath photograph on page 7 of the Sunday Guardian virtually told the entire June 19 story – but mainly, and perhaps only, to those who have walked the Fyzabad trail.

As a 1980s labour reporter I made the walk several times. When I looked around then, it was hard to tell the difference between the journalists covering the annual event and the trade union members celebrating it – except we did not typically join in the singing, or bear placards.

I believe we all knew at the time that our marching with the celebrants represented much more than “coverage”, even though our demeanour would change, and our press passes become more openly displayed once we reached the bandstand and the speeches we could have reported on, even before hearing them.

Even so, we were realising that more than 40 years following the advent of modern trade unionism in T&T, the broad developmental role of the labour movement had begun to change. Oil and gas wealth was transforming the land and peoplescape. The politics had evolved. A new status quo had begun to take effect, within which unions held a fixed spot.

Political parties with any kind of popular support were moving further and further away from the interests of organised labour - save for the 1975/1976 version of the ULF. Neither the PNM nor the UNC can lay claim to sleepless nights over such matters.

Since those days, union membership has also shrunk to the extent that, today, under 20 percent of the working population is represented by a labour union – some of them undemocratic and dysfunctional.  

This has rendered a notion of tripartism marginal to essential questions of the social and economic well-being of the country. Had this been otherwise, the withdrawal of the three (yes, three) trade union federations from the National Tripartite Advisory Council would have had a far more seismic impact on today’s state of pandemic affairs.

Instead, nobody recognises any real change in the dynamics of public discourse or action.

Economist Vanus James was even moved to declare on the weekend that the interests of workers are now more appropriately placed in the hands of employers that are, in turn, reliant on state support for a more vibrant business environment.

“The mechanisms you need to support workers (are) through their jobs in the private sector,” he is quoted as saying.

Even so, Dr James acknowledged the value of both SMEs and the medium to large enterprise sectors. He however did not remind us (though he knows) that the state, in all its manifestations, is the single largest employer in the country, and that the informal sector will continue to grow, especially under current conditions, as a largely unrepresented employment cohort.

So, where do trade unions enter the picture? They represent a small and declining minority of workers. Their interests are not clearly aligned to the unrepresented majority. There is also no coherent, joint developmental agenda in the face of a pandemic that has severely reduced private and public financial resources, and led to a loss of jobs and economic opportunity.

Yet, enlightened trade unions can be among the most valuable assets in protecting the interests of workers wherever they are found by helping to define the terms of engagement involving a dominant state, a self-centred private sector, and the population.

Very little about this is included in the reporting of the Post-COVID Roadmap to Recovery. Not much more from anyone else has also portrayed a future in which commerce, industry, and finance can sustain and enrich us all through productive engagement of the country’s most important resource.

There are, in fact, no “good old days” of trade unionism to which there should be a return. What we have are different times that are serving to re-focus a lethargic, complacent, and arguably incapable labour movement.

A new social compact is clearly insufficient to our needs if we do not move forward from tripartism to a new multipartism more closely aligned to current realities.

Under such conditions, trade unions may find more relevant space. If they are concerned. If they are willing. If they are able. The agony of labour confronts us all.