The Caribbean worker and the myth of change

May 03, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- The story was always told with great pride. In the town squares and trade union halls, in the lyrics of the calypsonians and the speeches of politicians, the story was repeated until it became truth: that the workers of the Caribbean had risen, in righteous indignation, and through their strikes and protests and endless marching in the sun, had broken the back of colonialism. That the man in the sugarcane field, the waterfront workers or the clerks in their white shirts and khaki pants had become, if only for a moment, the agents of their own history. It was a beautiful tale. It had rhythm. It had drama. It had heroes – in every country and island of the Caribbean.

But it was never true.

The Caribbean worker, who believed himself to be a maker of change, was always in the service of another man’s vision. The strikes, the protests, the slogans – all of them were real, yes. But they were never autonomous. They were never revolutionary in the way that mattered: in control. From the earliest rumblings of labor unrest in the 1930s to the supposed political awakenings of the 1960s and beyond, the worker was no more than a tool – used, manipulated, and discarded by the men who promised him everything and gave him little.

The colonial order, which seemed so monolithic and absolute, was already in decline. It was not the worker who hastened its end, but the logic of empire itself, worn thin by wars, costs, and embarrassment. Into that vacuum stepped a new kind of man – the local political leader, educated in British universities, dressed in khaki or black suit, fluent in the languages of grievance and ambition. These men, the so-called nationalists, wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of the workers’ struggle. They marched at the front of the protests, gave impassioned speeches about bread and justice, but they never intended to dismantle the house they inherited. They merely wished to move into it.

And so, they did. The flag changed, the anthem changed, but the essential structure of power remained. In Jamaica, in Trinidad, in Guyana, in Barbados – everywhere – the new rulers ascended not with the workers, but on their backs. And once they sat comfortably on the throne, they began to forget.

What followed was predictable. The unions became bureaucracies. Their leaders, once firebrands, became gentlemen. The militant rhetoric was replaced with carefully worded memoranda. In place of demands, there were negotiations. The worker, once told he was the heart of the nation, became once again what he always was: a man to be managed, placated, ignored.

In Guyana, it was Burnham who perfected the trick. The workers were told they were part of a “cooperative republic,” a socialist experiment built in their name. They received slogans, uniforms, mass games. But no real power. The sugar workers marched and protested and starved, and still their conditions worsened. Power, real power, rested not with them but with the party, the state, the elite who now called themselves comrades but behaved like kings.

In Trinidad, the oil and gas riches fattened the state, not the people. The unions barked occasionally, but they had long been brought to heel. The independence movement had given birth not to empowerment but to dependency: on government jobs, on state contracts, on handouts disguised as policy. The worker’s rage was real – but it was also impotent.

Even in the smaller islands, the pattern repeated itself. Leaders rose on the backs of mass movements and then quickly severed the connection. Labor, which had once spoken with force, became fractured, commodified. The worker, who once believed he was the engine of change, found himself outside the gates of power, begging to be let in.

The tragedy of the Caribbean worker is that he mistook participation for agency. He mistook his presence at the scene of history for authorship. But the script was never his. It was written elsewhere, by men who knew how to use the language of suffering to advance their own quiet aspirations. In truth, the worker’s real rebellion was brief, perhaps even illusory – a moment when his voice was heard, not because it carried power, but because it could be used.

And now? What remains of that great dream? The trade unions have become caricatures. Their leaders cling to office like the worst kind of politician, insulated from renewal, allergic to criticism. The worker himself has become suspicious, cynical. He has seen too many promises broken, too many heroes revealed as frauds. He no longer believes in slogans. He has stopped marching. He has gone back to surviving.

Perhaps that is the final irony: that the worker, who once imagined himself to be the foundation of the new nation, has now become its most disillusioned citizen. He sees clearly, more than most, that nothing has changed. The plantation house has a fresh coat of paint, but the overseers still bark orders. The economy is still controlled by forces he does not understand. And the men who once led the struggle now sit at cocktail parties, talking about development and global competitiveness.

In the end, the worker never had power. He had hope, he had rage, he had memory. But power – the power to shape his own destiny – was always withheld, dangled like a carrot, withdrawn when it was no longer useful. That is the true story of labor in the Caribbean. Not the myth of liberation, but the slow realization of betrayal. Not triumph, but loss. A story not of victory, but of illusion – beautifully told, repeatedly believed, and quietly mourned.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)   

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