Labour and Trade Unions

May 01, 2013 Editorial

Today, the nation commemorates Labour Day, a day dedicated to the recognition of our workers and their contribution to our wellbeing and progress. If any nation should remember and honour workers, it ought to be Guyana. Ninety percent of our population is here because their ancestors were brought here to contribute their labour, whether involuntarily or voluntary, in the endeavour that eventually produced a state.
In the struggle to be treated with dignity, labour entities recognised early on that they would have to struggle against the forces that used them as machines that were only in existence to produce benefits for the owners. Every struggle against colonialism was waged by workers. In the beginning, it was slaves like Cuffy rising up against the plantation owners, later the indentured servants took matters in their own hands in spontaneous strikes and protests, and eventually with the formation of trade unions directly after WWI, it was accepted that workers’ rights were to be legitimately represented by these organisations.
At this time, political parties were just a gleam in the eyes of a prescient few and, in point of fact, most of the latter organisations emerged from the bowels of the labour movement in the Caribbean. From Bustamante in Jamaica to Cheddi Jagan in Guyana, they rode into political office on the backs of trade unions. Today, however, the labour movement is in disarray, not only in Guyana but in most parts of the world.
Rather symbolically, the individual who played the key role in the decimation of trade unions, former Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, recently passed away. In connection to that role, breaking all the rules of British propriety, her old adversaries celebrated rather than mourned her passing.
By the 1970s, in the developed nations, the trade unions had exposed the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and taken an upper hand in their bargaining with the owners of businesses. The latter mourned their diminution of profits and under the leadership of individuals like Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US, rolled back the influence of trade unions.
That process led to its inevitable denouement in the collapse of the entire economic system as the purchasing power of the workers, the bulk of the consumer- class, was immiserised. In Guyana, the PNC “co-operative” government of the day, ostensibly in collaboration with the workers and their trade unions, defanged the latter.
The return of democracy after free and fair elections in 1992 did nothing to change the status of trade unions since the conditions for the change in the regime forced acceptance of the neo-liberal order established by Thatcher-Reagan, in which trade unions were peripheralised. For the latter organisations, it was a change from Tweedledum to Tweedledee.
A further complication in the local scenario was the split of the trade union movement, initially along the same ethnic lines that characterised the political divide, but eventually, whether pragmatically or opportunistically, along “pro” and “anti” government lines. Today, as in the last decade, we will see two May Day parades by the two factions. But in the meantime, the economy is undergoing seismic changes that are reflected in the workforce but are unaddressed by the trade unions.
Take the largest organised work forces – sugar workers and public servants. Even if the industry had not imploded, the mechanisation that was always on the cards would have cut the workforce into a fraction of its former numbers. Similarly, from the beginning of the new dispensation in the economy, via the Washington Consensus conditions imposed by the IMF/World Bank, the Public Service was also scheduled to be decimated. But the trade union leaders stuck their heads in the sand.
The new economy is going to be dominated by ICT-related industries in the long term and mining activities (especially gold, bauxite, petroleum, manganese, uranium, diamonds etc.) and if trade unions are to remain relevant they have to reset their modus operandi. To proceed in the present mode is to guarantee extinction.

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