Just as she was being confirmed as the winner in the Public Services Association’s leadership election last week, its new president, Felisha Thomas, rushed to speak about how the PSA was determined to remove the PNM from power and the possibility of supporting the main Opposition, the UNC, in this year’s general election.
It was quite a start.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been some pushback since then, starting with one of the defeated candidates, Nixon Callender, who condemned what he termed an alarming shift towards political alignment within the union.
According to him, the move would make the PSA a political weapon instead of being what it is supposed to be: the representative body for public servants in T&T.
Mr Callender’s concerns make sense, both existentially and legally speaking.
First, the existential points.
Trade unions, by definition, are and have always been political beings.
It is also true to say that, across the world, they tend to lean more towards one political party than another—the Democrats in the US or Labour in the UK, for instance (in the case of Labour, the party came from and was shaped by the trade union movement in the first place).
Here, we did have political parties that came directly from the labour movement, but none went very far, and the two main ones we have now aren’t hardwired to the labour movement.
Most trade unions around the world tend to maintain a degree of independence from party politics for very good reasons—they often need to engage with whichever party is in power, and a more liberal or left-leaning one doesn’t always go the way the labour movement may want them to go.
A good example is Germany under chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was elected in 1998 as the leader of the more left-leaning Social Democratic Party but drove a number of major employment and tax reforms considered by some in his own party as ‘neo-liberal’ and strongly opposed by the country’s main trade unions.
In the end, his reforms prevailed.
By keeping their party politics power dry, trade unions are freer to engage with the debates of the day relevant to the membership’s interests without being directly associated with any specific political entity.
This freedom is essential for their work, even if they may be seen as more or less informally associated with any given party.
Independence from party politics also matters because it respects the membership and those who, like it or not, are represented by trade unions, especially here in T&T given the way our labour laws work.
When a trade union is recognised in the workplace and is formally given bargaining powers, it represents all workers, independent of whether they are paying members or not.
In other words, under our labour laws, a worker cannot negotiate directly with the employer his or her terms and conditions, including pay, because only the union can do that through the collective bargaining process.
So, going back to the new PSA president’s statement about her ‘first order of business’ being the removal of the People’s National Movement from office, Ms Thomas would be doing that supposedly on behalf of workers who may well be supporters or even members of the PNM as well as those who support other parties or none at all.
To put it bluntly, the PSA’s members, together with those who are forced to be represented by the PSA but don’t have a say in the union’s elections, are not necessarily giving her or any other labour leader the mandate to support a given political party. And she should both understand and respect that.
But there are legal reasons to think carefully about the PSA’s actions, too.
Although it doesn’t ban political activities by the labour movement, the Trade Unions Act is explicit about the need for such organisations to clearly separate what is about the membership’s interests from what is political activity. It is also clear about the need for trade unions to ensure that the separation applies to how they use their members’ dues.
It first demands that political activities be approved in advance, via a ballot and by a majority of the members voting.
It then states that, to engage in such activities, payments must come from a separate political fund that members may contribute to on a voluntary basis—it goes on to make it clear that members who refuse to contribute to such funds cannot be discriminated against by the union.
The tricky part is that overseeing this process and the person who should deal with grievances from members regarding alleged misuse of union funds put towards political activities is the ever-elusive registrar—the same who should be keeping an eye on the trade union’s accounts but apparently never spotted the PSA’s shortcomings a few years ago as far as their bookkeeping was concerned.
None of this means that the labour movement shouldn’t or couldn’t be part of the wider political debate that vibrant democracies like ours ought to have.
But union leaders must know that, unless clearly consulted on the matter through the ballot box, winning union leadership elections doesn’t equal membership permission for them to support a political party or to engage in formal alliances with them.
And, just like party political leaders should do when chosen to run the country, elected labour leaders should run the union for all members, just not for supporters of one party or another.
It would also be wise for political parties to avoid the acceptance of any demands from trade unions in exchange for electoral support, as, if or when in power, that may come back to bite them.
Even more so when the union is the one representing government employees in a country where the sector is in desperate need of productivity gains and cost reduction—the very things that tend to face blanket opposition from those representing public servants.
