Raphael John-Lall

Trade union­ists can en­ter pol­i­tics if they choose as that is their de­mo­c­ra­t­ic right says Labour Min­is­ter Er­rol McLeod."Let us not get con­fused as this is just a few peo­ple in lead­er­ship po­si­tions in unions who en­ter pol­i­tics in this way and not unions as an in­sti­tu­tion. T&T is a democ­ra­cy and peo­ple are free to en­ter pol­i­tics. I was a mem­ber of Par­lia­ment from 1976 to 1981 when I was a trade union­ist," he said.

McLeod, a for­mer Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) pres­i­dent, was speak­ing on Fri­day at a break­fast sem­i­nar on man­age­ment and labour re­la­tions at the T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce, West­moor­ings.The fea­ture speak­er, Dr Michael Mac­co­by, an Amer­i­can ex­pert on labour re­la­tions, when an­swer­ing ques­tions from the au­di­ence on trade union­ists mov­ing away from their core labour func­tions and en­ter­ing pol­i­tics, called T&T a "high­ly politi­cised" so­ci­ety.

"You have a very politi­cised so­ci­ety and that gets in­to the way of ra­tio­nal­i­ty," Mac­co­by said.Re­fer­ring to the im­passe at the Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) last year which crip­pled ce­ment pro­duc­tion and af­fect­ed the econ­o­my, McLeod crit­i­cised the ap­proach of the present OW­TU lead­er­ship on how it dealt with the mat­ter.He said when he was pres­i­dent of the OW­TU he did a lot of work in build­ing a re­la­tion­ship be­tween TCL's man­age­ment and OW­TU.

"When you look at the new play­ers on the scene in OW­TU and TCL, they have di­vert­ed from what we were try­ing to do. The suc­cess of that com­pa­ny will de­pend on those who man­age it and those who are em­ployed by it," he said.McLeod al­so said that the present labour laws were not ad­e­quate to deal with mod­ern labour is­sues in T&T.

"The In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act (IRA), in its cur­rent form, is not suf­fi­cient­ly ad­e­quate to ad­dress is­sues that per­tain to the em­ploy­ment of do­mes­tic work­ers for ex­am­ple. When con­flict aris­es, the re­sponse is tan­ta­mount to fire­fight­ing, re­sort­ing to ac­tion when a prob­lem aris­es. By con­trast, the rec­om­men­da­tion from the In­ter­na­tion­al Labour Or­gan­i­sa­tion (ILO) is for state par­ties to con­sid­er pre­ven­ta­tive con­cil­i­a­tion in for­mu­lat­ing good labour re­la­tions poli­cies," he said.

He al­so said af­ter 32 years the Min­istry of Labour has re­con­sti­tut­ed the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee (IRAC) to re­view the cur­rent labour laws."This com­mit­tee has been do­ing some very in­ter­est­ing work as part of its re­view of the IRA which we will share with stake­hold­ers as the work ad­vances," he said.