THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

May 01, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

The following is a repeat of a May Day Column published four years ago. Looking back at it, it remains relevant today, a sure indication that instead of moving forward, labour continues to move in the opposite direction.
Labour is NOT at the crossroads. It has long detoured into the woods of obscurity.
And please, it was not the PPP which was responsible for this development. Long before 1992, the labour movement had undermined its independence and therefore its effectiveness to adequately represent the interests of workers outside of politically-charged environments.
The crisis of the trade unionism is now that it is powerless in the face of the power of the State. The crisis of the trade union is that it is unable to be effective because it faces a crisis of legitimacy.
The Trade Union Congress should be the least to speak about democracy, because its own irrelevance today has resulted from its undemocratic nature, best exemplified by the failure of the largest union in Guyana to hold the presidency of the umbrella organization.
Despite this crisis of legitimacy, labour ought to have had a greater bite. This lack of effectiveness to secure greater benefits for workers has its origins not in local divisions, even though these have been pronounced, but within the most powerful nation on Earth, the United States of America.
Ever since Ronald Reagan in the 1980 broke the ranks of the air traffic controller strike in his country, the weakness of the labour movement was exposed. Employers, including the State, discovered that they no longer had to fear labour and they never did in the years that followed.
In Guyana, one of the longest strikes took place in 1989. The Desmond Hoyte administration would not budge. This led to divisions within union ranks. GAWU crawled back to work after being satisfied with regaining the right to collective bargaining. Those bemoaning the present state of affairs of labour in Guyana , should be reminded that it was just two decades ago that the right to collective bargaining within the sugar industry was restored, and was restored as a compromise solution during the struggle for a living wage.
The Public Service Union in the mid-nineties called a prolonged strike. The strike ended in disarray after the union and government agreed to arbitration. Union leaders had to be escorted to safety from the ire of their own members.
All of these events were not the cause of the decline of labour in Guyana. They merely reflected the symptoms of a worldwide weakness in labour which, as indicated earlier, had been exposed during the Reagan years. In Guyana, it was also clear that when it came to industrial action, workers could not afford to indefinitely sustain the withdrawal of labour.
This decline in global militancy has been reflected in labour laws and jurisprudence that have become less friendly to labour. Guyana is no exception. The Termination of Employment and Severance Pay Act of Guyana allows workers to be paid when their services are severed or terminated, as distinct from being dismissed. But employees can now be legitimately severed for almost any reason, short of discrimination, including for loss of confidence by your employer.
Labour’s historic means of counteracting these actions has been to withdraw their labour. But the labour movement today has neither the means nor can they command the support to make such withdrawal effective. The workers are the ones least able to afford the deprivation of income that result during strikes and therefore, strikes are generally ineffective.
The Teachers’ Union has continued to sign five-year wage agreements with the government for 5% increases along with access to house lots and duty-free concessions. This agreement undermines the labour movement as a whole because the government will use this 5%, as it has been doing for years now, as the benchmark for offering or imposing wages on public sector workers. And in the absence of government offering higher wages, private employers have no incentive to pay any better. All workers therefore suffer as a result of this 5% deal, not just teachers.
But the teachers, who are already woefully underpaid, are not going to rail against the union. No, they are going to blame the government for their situation.
Labour relations must move away from the paradigm of being concerned just about the rights of workers. Labour agreements can no longer be just about workers’ rights. That era is gone, long gone. New labour arrangements must be instituted that balance the interests of employers with the rights of workers.
No self-respecting employer is going to allow any union to make an agreement on an option for workers’ benefits, and then when the time comes for the agreement to be formally inked, the union calls for negotiations. No self-respecting union will continue to abide by any collective bargaining agreement which it feels is being breached by the union.
Collective bargaining agreements must not now just be about a mechanism for settling disputes and for facilitating negotiations. Built into these collective bargaining agreements must be provisions that allow employers to move to abrogate or apply sanctions when unions breach such agreements.
And for workers, these new agreements must remove the need for annual negotiations on wages. These agreements must now incorporate detailed provisions which link wage increases to measurable indicators. Thus, for example, the level of wage increases should be linked to set targets and obligations by both management and employees so that when management fails, workers do not suffer and when workers fail, they should not expect a reward.

---

---