GAWU ALSO NEEDS TO BE HELD TO ACCOUNT

Dec 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The sugar workers who were protesting this week got off at the wrong stop. Instead of protesting outside of the Ministry of Finance, the group should have been picketing further up the road outside of their union’s headquarters, for it was their union who let them down.
The union failed to object to the appointment of two state employees being part of the Arbitration Tribunal. They ought to have insisted on a tribunal comprised of persons who were not in the employ of the government. They did not and thus their frustration at the award of the tribunal is misplaced.
It is not as if this experience is novel to them. The last time there was an arbitral tribunal the workers also got a disappointing offer. Last year the award could not compensate for inflation and since inflation is projected by the IMF for this year at 3.3%, it means that for the second year in a row, the real incomes of sugar workers have fallen.
The sugar union cannot escape blame for what has taken place but they also have every right to be disgusted with the award made by the arbitral tribunal.
The across-the-board 3% award does not seem consistent with the contentions made in the report that there was poor governance on the part of the sugar corporation.
Why then in this context should the sugar workers be made to suffer because of the poor governance? If the award was, as was claimed, based on the principles of equity and fairness, why does it seem to rely so heavily on another principle: the ability of the corporation to pay and sustain wages increases?
Why if there was poor governance did the tribunal make an across-the-board award? Why did it not decide where the sources of productivity gains within the corporation and apportion the wage increases accordingly? If the field did better than the factory, would not the principles of equity and fairness dictate that field workers should receive a higher award than those areas that underperformed. Or is it that field productivity remained lower than factory productivity?
All of these questions need to be placed in the public domain and this is why the sugar union ought to also have insisted that the hearings of the tribunal be made public so that the media could report on the various presentations that were made.
The biggest slip-up however remains the union’s non-objection to the composition of the tribunal. The union ought to be bound by the award of the tribunal until such time as it was fully constituted by persons with no employment ties to the government. This column dealt with this matter before and the union did not publicly express any disappointment with the composition of the tribunal.
In this context the union has neither the legal or moral mandate to be protesting the award. The union is legally bound by the award, something that it accepts, but it is disappointed that the tribunal gave the corporation until March next year to pay the award. Given its own position as regards the composition of the tribunal, the union also has no moral authority to be questioning the award.
Thus it is left to the sugar workers to decide where the chips must fall. Unions must now realize that they cannot escape responsibility for failing to achieve what their workers demand. They must be held accountable for the failings.
The sugar workers must therefore make a decision about their union. It is time that the workers move to ensure more effective union representation. GAWU should no longer be allowed to feel that they have the unconditional support of workers. Thus support must be based on performance and the workers must question what GAWU has achieved for workers.
It is time for the workers to consider a new union to represent them. So long as GAWU continues to have ties with the ruling party, then the workers cannot feel comfortable. Sugar is taking a battering and the workers are feeling the squeeze. The workers therefore need to decide now about the representation that they will receive.
In making a decision whether to break with GAWU, the workers need to ask themselves that critical question.
The union needs to ask not what the government has done for them, but rather how much has what has been done for sugar workers been as a result of GAWU. If the answer to that question is that GAWU has failed the sugar workers, then the workers should move towards new representation.

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