Once the restrictions of public gatherings were lifted with the end of the State of Emergency, trade union leaders, most notably Vincent Cabrera, president general of the Banking, Insurance and General Workers Union and Ancil Roget, president general of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union have been promising a confrontation with the government. Within days, the gun talk began. Dismissing the 107 days under the State of Emergency as a "democratic drought" Cabrera claimed that "the trade union movement was in a serious and stringent straitjacket." Roget almost immediately threatened industrial action, promising a regime of no overtime work at Petrotrin.
At Friday's street demonstration, Roget peppered the crowd with further provocation, noting that the crowd, smaller than expected, was just "smoke" and the "fire" was still to come, along with a "day of reckoning." In his address, Roget assured the assembled workers: "We have to be better next time around...we have to go back and do the work." We agree, but what that work is to be is likely to be quite divergent depending on one's perspective on the changing role of labour in the 21st century and the part that collective bargaining must play in it. It is a simple matter of observed fact that in the global economy, the nations that are moving ahead of their peers are those which place an emphasis on worker education, advancement and achievement.
Those that are falling behind are those where more priority is placed on raising wages, supporting ineffective practices and adversarial relationships between entrepreneurs and labour. Dr Anthony N Sabga, chairman emeritus of the ANSA McAL Group, correctly noted in a speech last month to the Employer's Consultative Association, that union leaders must modernise their approach to worker representation to remain relevant in tomorrow's workplace. "What I see and hear in these threats of shutdown is a sense of desperation. This is a thinking that is outdated, and which would harm the entire country." The dogged battle that trade union leaders seem keen to re-engage with the government over the perceived five per cent wage cap is not just pointless; it is retrograde.
More compelling discussions would centre on programmes to empower the workforce through retraining to better fit the demands of tomorrow, enlarging the pool of skilled and employable workers through interventions in the school system and more positively engaging the government on ways that the labour movement might advance development initiatives to improve the overall size of the wage pie instead of doggedly arguing for a larger slice of a shrinking resource. Today's student has only to Google "education results, China, India" to quickly understand that the competition for their future jobs won't necessarily be coming from their own school. Over the next two decades, these two nations, which have put education on their front burner, will be flooding the world market with an unprecedented surge in highly employable labour.
The next wave of labourers looking to find work in Trinidad and Tobago won't be pushing wheelbarrows; they will be striding in with briefcases full of impossible to resist qualifications. The party in Port-of-Spain on Friday would have been good for the egos of union leaders and offered an opportunity for frustrated workers to vent their annoyance with their circumstances, but it failed to address a single relevant issue that will face these workers over the next two decades.
There is an urgent mission awaiting the attention of both government and trade unions, but it has little to do with the size of wage increases. If the government is to truly craft a national business strategy capable of competing capably in the fierce global economy, it cannot do so without partnering with trade unions. Trade unions, for their part, cannot simply parade and bluster over the issues that will offer immediate salve to their members, they must acknowledge the parlous state of the nation's labour pool and commit to representing the future interests of tomorrow's workforce.