Looking on at the behaviour of the unions in general and the OWTU in particular over the last couple of years you'd be hard pressed to not notice the contrasting emotional states that mark the confrontation of labour and capital.
Capital comes across as aloof and contemptuous. Labour is often confrontational, pissed off, and over-eager to shut down, mash up, and get on bad. You get the impression that there's more at stake here than securing the best deal for workers. What's at stake is the opportunity to sock it to the employer class for reasons aside from the issues at hand.
I should observe here that, according to the government, the majority of labour agreements the PP inherited have been amicably settled, and the irruptions of the labour movement we see are anomalies. Still, those outbursts are sufficiently visceral to warrant attention.
A brief look at labour history from 1937 (its pivotal moment in the popular mind) might shed some light on this persistent and destructive emotionalism in the conduct of union-management-government business. The 1937 incidents have been reduced to the image of TUB Butler leading the masses through struggle to freedom. But the story is more nuanced.
In the 1930s the workers' position and demands were recognised to be just by the British governor, Murchison Fletcher and his Colonial Secretary, Howard Nankivell. (As reward for concern for the masses, both men had their careers ruined by local capitalists.)
Nonetheless, the local business people refused to budge, and it was clear that capital vs labour was just a fig leaf for the real issue: black vs white. The labour situation, like every other situation in Trinidad at the time, was rife with racial undertones.
White South African managers had been hired, who racially abused the workers. Working conditions were abysmal. Business, personified in George F Huggins, ran in a direct line from the 19th century, and was more interested in dominating and punishing workers, and reinforcing the social hierarchy, than business productivity.
Fletcher wrote to his superiors in London that: "The roots of this colony-wide unrest go very deep. Labour has lived in conditions of extreme poverty and squalour, and the colour line has kept employer and employed at a long arm's length apart [...] When, before striking [the workers] presented a list of grievances and requests, a senior representative of Messrs Huggins and Company had called them black dogs whom he would starve into surrender. I was deeply impressed by the intensity of the hatred this engendered."
The emergence of Eric Williams in 1956 ensured that all affairs of the country would be characterised by such a strong racial/emotional subtext. Williams's life as a politician began as a desire for revenge against his enemies, the upper classes who had impoverished his father, the Caribbean commission, the dons at Oxford, and battalions of foes, real and imagined. He communicated these grievances to the masses, who internalised them, and translated them into the institutional and public language of the new country.
This was evident in the 1960s, a decade rife with labour violence for reasons which seemed divorced from economics. A sign of things to come was provided in 1957. On March 27, 1957, Simplex (a business machine company) took an ad in the Guardian, protesting that Williams had, in a public meeting, accused Simplex of treating him like a "shoeshine boy"–a statement loaded with the imprecations of the treatment of African-Americans in the pre-civil rights US.
The dynamic repeated in labour confrontations throughout the 1960s. A good example was in February 3, 1965. Federation Chemicals took out an ad in the Guardian complaining that workers refused tasks they felt "beneath their dignity," and go-slows and walkouts were damaging productivity, and the country's reputation as an investor-friendly destination.
The OWTU responded on February 5, with an ad that stated in part: "Oilworkers...are proud patriots who love their country and are mindful of its future welfare more than any foreigners." Furthermore, the workers had been "toughened by the years of inhuman treatment, low living conditions and the slave master's whip," and foreigners should be reminded that "Massa day done."
(On September 8, 1965, Williams was reported on the Guardian's front page as lecturing the people of Gonzales about "foreigners who come here and interfere.")
So what appeared to be labour issues were evidently re-enactments of the deep racial dramas which were being inflamed, rather than being salved, in the belly of the society. And the labour movement of today traces its trajectory from the 60s, not 1937, so this understanding, that labour is merely a medium to enact race and class dramas, is deeply embedded into the unions' ethos.But what about the employer class? In the 1960s, a predictable counter-narrative emerged.
The Guardian, on October 7, 1965, published the remarks of a feature address given at an Employers Consultative Association luncheon, which had it that "certain people" were preaching a philosophy of "something for nothing." Rather than acknowledging its sins, capital persisted in pretending its own behaviour was all business, and untainted by the sins of history, and labour was merely ungrateful and lazy.
By not dealing rationally with the historical roots of conflict between labour and capital (black and white, upper and lower class) the animus unleashed in 1956 eventually culminated in the Black Power riots of 1970.Many people have forgotten, if they ever knew, that Black Power was primarily an economic phenomenon.
The landscape today is cosmetically different. The main antagonist is government, rather than the upper classes' commercial interests, but the same resentments smoulder, and are stoked rather than doused.But until the truth is faced, and education becomes more than a hustle, and a costume show, the status quo will continue.
