A brief note on the labour situation back then

May 09, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
I read the recent piece about the state of trade unions in present-day Guyana. Trade unions, Labour unions, no doubt other ‘unions’ in our precious country have always been able to perform their own “parlour tricks”, as a British boss of mine normally described questionable behaviour. In the mid-1950s in London, a British colleague and union representative told me it was a legal requirement that any changes to existing workplace conditions of service, particularly for the worse, could apply only to employees joining after the date the new rules were signed into existence and became legal. In the early 1960s, when we were still a British colony, the Civil Service revised their employees’ conditions of service, depriving them of many entitlements. The Civil Service union accepted the changes, thus making the new rules applicable to all civil servants, some of them just a few years away from their retirement.
At the time, when I spoke to a former mature colleague and asked why they allowed the union to treat them like that, based on what I had been told by an active trade unionist /member of the British official body responsible for personnel management, what the established rules were supposed to be, he replied “Well, you see we didn’t know”! Of course, but their representative union members should have known, and insisted on their rights. It is difficult to accept that ‘boys’ were sent to negotiate with ‘men’. The new rules should have applied only to employees joining the Service after such rules had been agreed to and signed into existence. Conclusion: local unions have always been able to operate to suit themselves! Nothing new here!
Geralda Dennison

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