The labour move­ment in T&T faced its worst cri­sis ever this year, ac­cord­ing to Joseph Re­my, Pres­i­dent of the Fed­er­a­tion of In­de­pen­dent Trade Unions (Fi­tun).

“It was a year where we be­lieved that the labour move­ment faced its most dan­ger­ous threat to its ex­is­tence.

“There was the whole is­sue of Petrotrin and the at­tack on the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU) and af­ter the at­tacks on the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers’ Union (CWU) and this sig­nalled to us that the labour move­ment was un­der se­ri­ous at­tack by this regime,” he said

Re­my, who ap­pealed to work­ers and mem­bers of the trade union move­ment to “shed their ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences” and work to­geth­er for the good of the sec­tor, said: “De­spite what­ev­er side of the ide­o­log­i­cal side you are on, once you say that you be­long to the labour move­ment then all gov­ern­ments will see you in one par­tic­u­lar light.

“As such, this calls for peo­ple not to be frag­ment­ed any more but to be uni­fied in pur­pose and in­tent be­cause, at the end of the day, the de­struc­tion is at all fronts with the labour move­ment.”

Michael An­nisette, Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre (Natuc), said 2018 was a “dis­ap­point­ment” as there was “a con­cert­ed at­tack to un­der­mine and mar­gin­alise the trade union move­ment and by ex­ten­sion the voice of the work­ers.”

He said: “Look at the Petrotrin is­sue, look at the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices Com­pa­ny in Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT), the Port where the Gov­ern­ment is starv­ing it of fi­nance to keep it go­ing.

“Look at the is­sue of the out­stand­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions that we have been rais­ing at the Na­tion­al Tri­par­tite Ad­vi­so­ry Coun­cil (NTAC). All these were is­sues in our view that did not hap­pen by ac­ci­dent. It was de­lib­er­ate and cre­at­ed to have an at­mos­phere where­by the trust in the trade union would fal­ter.”

An­nisette said in the new year NATUC will be tak­ing the fight to those who are try­ing to de­stroy the labour move­ment.

“We have been do­ing our crit­i­cal analy­sis of all the is­sues af­fect­ing the labour move­ment. We deem 2019, the year of the fight back. There is an at­tempt to un­der­mine cer­tain union. We can­not have a Gov­ern­ment be­ing run on the ba­sis of pub­lic re­la­tions,” he said.

Gabriel Faria, CEO of the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce said one of his main wish­es in 2019 is for the labour move­ment and busi­ness to work to­geth­er dur­ing this dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic pe­ri­od.

When asked to re­spond to this, An­nisette said the trade union move­ment has al­ways been opened to di­a­logue. How­ev­er, he said, trade union­ists are scep­ti­cal.

“When you have dif­fer­ent in­ter­ests the coun­try will have these types of cri­sis. The busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty must un­der­stand that we con­tin­ue to have a widen­ing gap in terms of in­come and wages.

“They can­not talk about work­ing with the trade union move­ment if they are not se­ri­ous,” he said.