Labour Day, June 19, is five days away. Today, we pay tribute to one of the pioneers of the labour movement whose name many people may not even know.
There are those whose nation-building contributions make the front page of the newspapers and are at the top of the newscasts on the electronic media. But there are others who are in the background doing the hard work for their leaders and organisations to succeed in having the interests of those who they represent get the results required.
Doodnath Maharaj, who retired 25 years ago as General Secretary of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union, is one of those mighty achievers.
He began as a yard boy at a bungalow in which the expatriates in the oil industry, back in the colonial times, when the transnational corporations such as Apex, Trinidad Petroleum Development, and Kern Trinidad Oilfields, owned every barrel of the extracted oil.
“Well, as a yard boy, there’s a boss. You clean the yard, you clean the house, you do the grocery and that kind of thing,” recalls Maharaj of his duties then as a teenager. “He, the boss, had three children. They go to school and you clean their shoes, you clean the toilet. Well, the whole housekeeping thing, that is a yard boy’s job.”
His take home pay as a yard boy was calculated at 50 cents an hour and by the end of the month totalled approximately $18.00. “That was for the family, as my father got injured and could not work and the money had to stretch to serve the family,” says Maharaj.
Doodnath Maharaj ended his working career several decades later as General Secretary of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union, the OWTU, known as one of the most powerful and militant trade unions in T&T, with a history which goes back to the 1930s, not as a formal union, but when its foundation leader, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, began mobilising oil workers in the Fyzabad area.
He also attracted the sugar workers from Central Trinidad to take the fight for the movement from starvation wages and dehumanised working conditions for workers in oil and sugar, the two major industries of the period.
It was a critical juncture, which gained administrative strength when Butler was captured and put out of circulation on Nelson Island and Adrian Cola Rienzi (Krishna Deonarine) took on the organisational and administrative effort to formalise the Oilfield Workers Union and the All Trinidad General Workers’ Trade Union (ATGWTU)
“In those days, the people who lived around the oil fields worked there, so you find that it’s a kind of you living in the area of the oil field, everybody like a family. So when you go to work again, you meet people… people of African and Indian descent sharing their food and their stories,” says Maharaj, accounting for the two groups being together in a class struggle against common exploitation in the oilfields.
Maharaj says his real education started at the office of the Branch Union in Fyzabad, “where we took our problems in the fields for discussion and guidance.” That education was furthered abroad at international labour union conferences in Europe and elsewhere. “If I had gone to Oxford or LSE (London School of Economics), all I can say is that what I have in my head wasn’t going to be there,” says Maharaj.
First, he was made a trustee of the OWTU, then elected as Assistant General Secretary and eventually elected as General Secretary to President General of the OWTU, George Weeks, arguably the most militant and respected trade union leader of his time.
Additional schooling in trade union and political activity came from his association with Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, George Weeks, Errol McLeod, and political associates of the OWTU, Basdeo Panday and ANR Robinson, the latter two served as prime minister at different points. Maharaj also had additional grounding with the likes of trade union lawyers, Allan Alexander and Lennox Pierre, and economist, Max Ifill.
In such company, Maharaj’s education expanded into politics, which he does not see as having a conflict with his trade union responsibilities: “politics is about taking the struggle for workers’ rights and benefits to a higher level.”
He naturally moved into the United Labour Front (ULF), made up of a variety of trade unions, which put an electoral scare into the then invincible People’s National Movement in the general elections campaign of 1976 with a motorcade along the East-West Corridor; eventually winning 26.2 per cent of the vote to secure ten of the 36 seats in the National Parliament.
“It is sad that the party broke up; we had great hopes,” says Maharaj wistfully; however, declining an invitation to comment as to why that was so.
High praise he gives for the two union (OWTU) leaders during his time: “I have no complaint with both as they got advances for union members,” says Maharaj.
“We got benefits, like workers’ medical and pension plans and housing benefits for workers, and expanded union representation of workers into T&TEC, and elsewhere outside the oil industry; that has given me great satisfaction says Maharaj,” and those accomplishments, he says, justify the Union’s reputation for being a “militant trade union”.
“The revolt against working conditions, low wages, no medical and other forms of benefits, people used to have to work for years and get nothing when they leave. Like today you have a pension plan, right?”
One of the major industrial battles engaged in by the OWTU under the presidency of George Weekes was against British Petroleum in 1963, when the company had taken over the operations of Apex, TPD and KPO oil companies and wanted to make redundant 1500 of the 2500 workers who had embarked on a 58-day strike.
Then, Industrial Court judge Isaac Hyatali allowed the multinational to draw down its workforce over a period of time rather than all at once. The OWTU, led by the recently elected President General, George Weekes, secured benefits for workers, including severance pay.
“That was a major battle led by Weekes and the first time that workers had received severance benefits,” says Maharaj
Of his interaction with Uriah Butler, he noted that the Chief Servant gave advice to the likes of Dave Darbreau and Geddes Granger and the others in the NJAC group. In Butler’s old age and sickness, George Weekes gave support to the “old warrior” of labour, brought him back into the union and paid for his medical bills and daily needs.
Maharaj also reminded me of his colleague and friend Soogrim Coolman who attended Butler in his closing days. He was one of the last Butlerites, and a senior colleague of Maharaj, who remains as the only one remaining from the Fyzabad group of the era: “they used to call me the baby of the group,” says Maharaj.
On the last occasion that he made the trip from the Charlie King Junction on the June 19th Labour Day, Maharaj had the responsibility to lay the wreath at the gravesite of the “Chief Servant”, Tubal Uriah “Buzz” Butler, the Grenadian born trade unionist and firebrand preacher, who came to Trinidad and stirred life into the labour movement here and across the region to contend for the rights of workers.
There was a personal price that Doodnath Maharaj paid for his deep and time-consuming involvement in trade union work and advocacy. He left full responsibility for keeping the family together, taking care of their two children, Rookmin, who became a journalist and Ganesh, to his wife, Mooniah Maharaj (Lakhan). She passed away in 2012. Obvious to me, is that she took a part of her husband with her.
At 88 years old, Doodnath lives peacefully with his memories in his hometown, Fyzabad, a contributor to nation-building from the labour movement.
Keep well, my friend, those of us who live and work today for decent wages under livable working conditions have to thank you and your colleagues for the struggle of yesterday – nuff respect.
