Raphael John-Lall

A work­ing class par­ty in T&T will not nec­es­sar­i­ly solve the ills that work­ers face says pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre (Natuc) Michael An­nisette. He was com­ment­ing on an in­ter­view in yes­ter­day's Sun­day Guardian in which trade union­ist Vin­cent Cabr­era called for a work­ing class par­ty in T&T. "I don't want to give peo­ple the idea that a par­ty like this will solve all the coun­try's prob­lems," he said. "I have no is­sue with a work­ing class par­ty that has the in­ter­ests of work­ers. "Look at the pro-labour Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) fac­tion of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment...they could not even get the Gov­ern­ment to change its po­si­tion on the five per cent of­fer."

An­nisette added that any move to­wards such a par­ty must go be­yond par­ty pol­i­tics. "We must change the sys­tem of gov­er­nance-we must make con­sti­tu­tion­al changes," he said. "Look at oth­er Caribbean coun­tries with prime min­is­ters who came out of labour....There was not much change and the wealth was not dis­trib­uted," he said. He al­so said true in­de­pen­dence should mean work­ers be­ing able to stand on their own feet eco­nom­i­cal­ly. "You can't have po­lit­i­cal in­de­pen­dence and not be eco­nom­i­cal­ly in­de­pen­dent," he said. "I be­lieve in a prag­mat­ic ap­proach." Com­ment­ing on Cabr­era's state­ment that the Gov­ern­ment had com­mit­ted a "po­lit­i­cal sin" by re­strict­ing trade unions' ac­tiv­i­ties with­in the state of emer­gency, he said this on­ly gave the em­ploy­ers "an up­per hand."

An­nisette said: "Our fo­rum is march­es and strikes. This is our tool. Em­ploy­ers don't have to do this, they have oth­er means to get what they want. "When our rights are tak­en away, what will we do?" he asked. De­fend­ing him­self from crit­ics who ar­gue that he is po­lit­i­cal­ly-bi­ased, An­nisette says he is free to sup­port any par­ty he feels like. "I don't feel my state­ments have been po­lit­i­cal," he said. "I have been be­fore the In­tegri­ty Com­mis­sion three times with re­gards to the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go, and I have come out squeaky clean. "Peo­ple say all kinds of things in this coun­try."