The GTUC top bosses need to shift gear

May 24, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,

“The Trade Union Movement is dying”, so says the GTUC President at last May Day celebration, according to SN May 2nd 2010. No where was the veracity of this statement more evident than in the Mining Town of Linden on May 1st 2010. This Mining Town, once the bulwark of trade union militancy and workers’ solidarity through mainly the Guyana Mine Workers Union and the Guyana Bauxite Workers Union when there used to be a mighty Bauxite Company that employed some 5000 workers instead of a little over 300 now, was silent as a grave. Not a word on the question of labour was addressed. Editor, last May Day I penned a letter under the heading,

“Labour movement in the Linden/Bauxite Community is in a state of paralysis” in which I stated: “It was one of the most dismal showing ever — most shameful; coming from a community that once stood out as having the most radical and militant work force….that once locked horns with the establishment and rocked their foundation….Since the advent of the extension of the Town Day event to a Town Week, the Labour Day celebration has been coinciding with it….has contributed to diminishing its significance.”

This year around there was no need to bemoan a poor turn out (25.30 workers) for there were none! Nothing took place; no march, no placards, the only two unions that came out to mark this historical occasion in their own small way was the Postal and Telecommunications Workers Union and a handful of workers from The Linden Hospital Complex, both at their selective locations. As mentioned above about the Town Week activities and May Day coinciding, adjustment should have been made to cherish and perpetuate this international historical event.

Instead unions leaders have neglected to address this issue, there are a host of things affecting the Town of Linden that need to be dealt with, the Town is now 40 years old and labour is in a sad shape.

And while some sit and talk of grand plans and dreams, with high hopes and optimism of a wide range of investment and the glorious future that awaits the Town, we cannot blind our eyes from what we are presently saddled with pretending they do not exist.

In the mean time while we wait, remember one has got to keep in good shape to greet the future and take advantage of it. If we choose to relegate labour to nothingness rest assure that we will be equally so treated, labour is the foundation upon which humanity and our civilization is built, that’s the way it has always and will always be.

And that is why the GTUC top bosses need to shift gear, they cannot sit and shout from the capitol city only, they need to see to it that the movement is organized throughout the land.

But coming back to the GTUC President’s remarks about the labour movement dying; after what I saw in Linden on Labour Day, I was not the least surprised, the writing has been on the wall for some time now, how could the TUC not see it, the way things are going it is easy to see the phasing out of unions: What took place in Linden is slowly but surely spreading and will in like manner strangle other regions. President Burton is seeing right — dead on target — the movement is dying. Young people are not labour conscious, labour don’t appeal to them nor respect them and they respond in like manner.

They are in a different time zone, with unemployment and piece meal jobs, an inadequate minimum wage not to mention the substantial number of the poorer working class who do not receive wages anywhere near the so called minimum wage figure and who are not entitled to any sort of fringe/or benefits/package bargain for by unions for their members.

All these and more, the struggle to survive make it so ironic yet understandable why young people do not fuss or cling to the labour movement, through which their labour and well being ought to be better champion and enhance.

And this is why the TUC will have the devils’ job in its effort to keep the movement alive, respective union leaders will have to take the initiative, be bold and innovative, find creative ways to pique their members’ interest/attention, they must be seen beyond a doubt as working in their best interest. If they are perceived by workers as being caught up with their own hustle, workers will not only dismiss them with scorn as sellout but even endanger their lives.

Young people have consciously/unconsciously deunionized themselves because for a long time now unions have lost their vibrancy, it seems as if all the grand courage, the sting, the fighting zeal have been spent dead during the reign of Burnham/PNC and the new young workers have inherited an exhausted, cold and feckless Trade Union movement that not only now lies in a state of paralysis but rather – to borrow a word — a necrotic body. And this is most unfortunate and a serious question for the GTUC; when labour is seen as having lost its significance and dignity, then “all gone”? This is the challenge facing the TUC which must be urgently be corrected, they have got to take the bull by the horn or else its requiem in the not too distant future.

Frank Fyffe

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