Sliding towards oblivion

Jan 12, 2009 Editorial

The brouhaha between the political parties that accompanied the passage of the amendment to the Trade Union Recognition Act Amendment Bill in Parliament, as the old year segued into the new, is more than coincidental.

The subject of the legislation was overtly concerned with seeking to keep up with developments in the trade union associative fraternity to clarify the definition of what body could nominate members to the Trade Union Recognition Board. Surely, no one could object if the law recognised that the old monolithic umbrella organisation – the venerable Trade Union Congress (TUC) — was not automatically that body as had been the case when the Act was first enacted over a decade ago. Time passes; the universe changes.

But those changes are not as serendipitous as some may want us to believe in some unfolding of a democratic imperative within the trade union movement. As is the case with most struggles in Guyana, the moving force behind the rift is politics – hence the appropriateness of Parliament as the forum for the latest outburst.

Most Guyanese would be familiar with the fact that our older political parties arose out of a trade union movement that had struggled for better conditions for the ordinary Guyanese workers in the colonial era. In their moment of coincidence of mobilisation drives, there was a special synergy and relevance of both vehicles.

However, the parties soon leapfrogged their sponsors as the colonial power accommodated the need for political independence.

The split in the political movement before independence was inevitably accompanied by a split in the labour movement – a split that was papered over on occasions but was never really healed. GAWU, the union of the sugar workers, and closely affiliated with the PPP, was never allowed to wield an influence within the umbrella TUC consistent with its numbers.

Using a number of subterfuges, including “paper unions”, it was kept on the sidelines by the TUC during the long PNC era. That no representative of GAWU ever acceded to the leadership of the TUC is reflective of its peripheralisation within that body.

The irony, however, was that in its willingness to play games with the politicians, the trade union movement was sowing the seeds of its own irrelevance. Subjugating its priority of representing workers’ interest to the whims of the political directorate, it is not surprising that workers became disenchanted with trade unionism.

If politics was where the action was, then why not deal with the real movers and shakers? As the contradictions of the old regime manifested themselves in, among other degenerations, the collapse of the economy, some trade unions sought to recover their independence, and broke away from the TUC to form the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG).

Some vibrancy was regained in the movement, but, unfortunately, it was expended in the political realm to assist in effecting regime change. The trade unions and their umbrellas were still playing second fiddle to the politicians – and in an arena where they could never have autonomy.

If they had perhaps focused their energies towards improving the living conditions of their membership, it is possible that they could have re-established some of their consequence. As it was, they were dependent on the new administration, looking beyond its own political struggles to “do the right thing”. They were hoping for the impossible.

The passage of the Trade Union Recognition Act in October 1997 was but a temporary respite in the political struggle by the now accepted surrogates. All bets were off as that struggle reached incendiary heights after the December 1997 elections and the trade unions were forced, once again, by the logic of their affiliations to “choose sides”. And it is in this mode that they have been stuck ever since.

Unfortunately, it is a mode in which they are only increasing their irrelevance in a world where trade unions as a species are becoming endangered as capital evolves into a global force that knows no borders.

Most Guyanese may have been surprised with the figure revealed in Parliament last week: of some 250,000 Guyanese workers, only twenty percent are unionised. And we can be sure this figure is optimistic.

We reiterate: if the trade union movement hopes to remain alive, it has to return to basics – struggling to improve workers’ rights rather than furthering the agendas of politicians. The two are rarely ever the same.

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