Many employers and business-minded interests often silently applaud the gradual retreat of trade unions as agents of fundamental action and change and authentic advocates of social justice in T&T. The fact is the institutional frameworks to achieve these ends, including securing the interests of public employers and private capital, have long outgrown current Caribbean models. So, the crisis resides not only on the turf of the labour movement.
It would have been just over 80 years ago that the first fissures in the colonial social compact became open wounds oozing onto the streets of capitals from Kingston to Georgetown to St George's with Port-of-Spain in between. It's true, at one time the tide of change became inevitable because of the ability of the labour movement to mobilise workers to intervene politically and otherwise on their own behalf.
It was easy then for the mostly expatriate "employer class" to join ranks in collaboration with those who ran the colonies. Though the challenges were essentially tripartite in nature, the state remained solidly in the corner of those who controlled both port and plantation.
Fast forward to the current period. In most instances, the dominant employer has become the state–if not through direct employment in the state sector through special interest companies and make-work social programmes meant to provide a deceptive release valve for otherwise disenfranchised people.
For years, the model of tripartite collaboration has been promoted as the best way out of a situation in which Caribbean labour markets are increasingly running short on the means to provide high levels of what the ILO experts describe as "social protection" as part of an overall framework to achieve the objective of "decent work" among other aspirations.
It has been an admirable campaign that has forced Caribbean governments, employers and trade union federations to engage joint discussions on ways forward for our fragile economies.
There is no denying that. I have covered successive conferences and consultations over the years and know that the ILO bureaucrats and experts have been able to initiate and insert into the required dialogue a high level of concern about our failure to provide, as the most recent Human Development Report reminds us, "human resilience beyond income."
Earlier this week, the ILO office for the Caribbean would have repeatedly made the point during yet another round of regional tripartite talks, this time in Guyana and focusing on social protection, social dialogue and formalisation–the latter being a longstanding project to insert into the "formal economy" those currently residing on its periphery but who make an important, and often unrecognised, contribution to the development process.
In many respects, though, these efforts continue to fall short of what is actually required to drive a sustainable development agenda that includes not only the goal of social justice and equity but the long-term viability of our societies as a whole.
I have controversially remarked at different fora that some countries of the Caribbean have defied all the rules we are usually taught about a capacity to survive the numerous environmental, social and developmental challenges faced by small and micro states. In some instances, the flying of a national flag is a deservedly ridiculed nonsense already addressed by several regional thinkers.
On this question of "tripartism," for instance, the role of the state as an overwhelmingly dominant employer in many respects grants it two de facto seats around the tripartite table. It also shows when governments have sycophantic friends in the labour movement.
There is also the question of unrepresented workers. Huge numbers of workers in the Caribbean–a majority in most instances–are not represented by trade unions. There is therefore no collective bargaining. Work contracts, if they exist at all, are almost all skewed in favour of arbitrary decision-making by employers.
This means there is a partner in this process who is absent from the table. The struggle over the years of the National Union of Domestic Employees to become "mainstreamed" into the labour movement is an instructive development we should not ignore.
Even so, there are thousands and thousands of workers whose voices are only heard when something goes wrong and there is resort, by regulation, via a trade union to the Industrial Court or through civil action in other courts. The vast majority suffer in silence.
The other missing partners emerge from the so-called "informal sector" who actually function as employers, but who are subject to the vagaries of a social system that places them last in line at the bank, the insurers and the official systems that provide occasional, selective relief and "bailouts" of the kind we have recently experienced.
The effort to "formalise" would thus remain a source of concern because people will continue to be suspicious of any official embrace.
The willingness of the current tripartite partners to assemble peacefully around the table represents to me more of an area of concern than something to be gratuitously applauded. There must be no comfort that unrepresented workers are incapable of presenting a cohesive set of concerns around the table. That the state's duality skews the process and that the official voice of employers continues not to represent the state of play on the ground. Who should feel comfortable about this?
It might well be that not unlike the explosions of the 1930s, a new form of social and political organisation is now an urgent pre-requisite to moving to the next stage of development. This appears to be territory into which none of the current institutions appears willing to go but is one that can at least provide baby steps in the direction of a more legitimate roundtable comprising all or most social partners.