To mark May 1st, the pres­i­dent of the All Trinidad Gen­er­al Work­ers’ Trade Union, Nir­van Ma­haraj, called for an im­me­di­ate change to T&T’s labour laws to pro­tect work­ers. Mr Ma­haraj is right but per­haps for the wrong rea­sons.

In his call for change, the labour move­ment’s past ghosts were re­vived, es­pe­cial­ly the peren­ni­al charge that multi­na­tion­als are the ones that leave the coun­try ow­ing em­ploy­ees un­paid salaries and ben­e­fits.

Spoil­er alert: they are not the main cul­prits.

But Mr Ma­haraj makes a good point about the need to move em­ploy­ees from the bot­tom of the cred­i­tors’ line, as it hap­pens not on­ly in T&T but al­so in many oth­er coun­tries, with the State, banks and many oth­ers of­ten amongst the first to claim any as­sets a bust com­pa­ny may have left be­hind.

He al­so called for a re­form of the Reg­is­tra­tion, Recog­ni­tion and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Board giv­en how slow it is to act. Again, he is right in iden­ti­fy­ing the prob­lem but his pro­posed so­lu­tion won’t ac­tu­al­ly solve it.

The re­al prob­lem with the Board is that it is as anachro­nis­tic as it gets. It was cre­at­ed in an era when jobs and busi­ness­es hard­ly changed. In to­day’s world, both busi­ness­es and em­ploy­ees must con­stant­ly adapt as mar­ket needs and tech­nol­o­gy change on a reg­u­lar ba­sis.

The re­al so­lu­tion to re­flect the needs of the coun­try’s econ­o­my is not to have a Recog­ni­tion and Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Board but to have an em­ploy­ment frame­work that re­flects the chang­ing na­ture of the econ­o­my whilst giv­ing the pro­tec­tions need­ed to en­sure agree­ments be­tween unions and em­ploy­ers are prop­er­ly doc­u­ment­ed and reg­is­tered.

Above all, we need to fo­cus on the re­al re­forms need­ed if we are to be com­pet­i­tive in a dig­i­tal and high­ly in­te­grat­ed glob­al econ­o­my. And, in the process, we al­so need to tack­le the aw­ful in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions cul­ture that so dam­ages T&T’s econ­o­my.

To be­gin with, we must cre­ate some­thing akin to a char­ter that pro­tects every­one’s ba­sic em­ploy­ment rights, ir­re­spec­tive of whether they are cov­ered by a recog­nised trade union or not.

The next step deals with the very point of union rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

In a true democ­ra­cy, em­ploy­ees must have a choice over be­ing rep­re­sent­ed by a trade union or not. As things stand, once a trade union is recog­nised in a busi­ness, work­ers forcibly be­come part of the bar­gain­ing unit, los­ing any right to ne­go­ti­ate di­rect­ly their own salary or oth­er in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions mat­ters.

On top of that, and bar­ring a few ex­cep­tions, em­ploy­ees in Trinidad and To­ba­go are not al­lowed to take a case di­rect­ly to the In­dus­tri­al Court, hav­ing to re­ly in­stead on a trade union to do so.

Labour lead­ers talk a lot about free­doms but, some­how, they over­look the fact that work­ers in this coun­try have no right to seek em­ploy­ment jus­tice un­less un­der an odd and pa­ter­nal­is­tic kind of tute­lage of a trade union.

In oth­er words, in our labour move­ment’s think­ing, the work­ing class is more than ca­pa­ble of rul­ing the world but not ca­pa­ble enough to seek em­ploy­ment jus­tice on their own, with­out the help­ing hand of a trade union.

An­oth­er wel­come re­form would be changes to the leg­is­la­tion de­signed to put both the labour move­ment and em­ploy­ers on an even keel as far as re­spect for the law is con­cerned.

At the mo­ment, unions can make vex­a­tious claims and even act in a way that can have a ma­te­r­i­al im­pact on a com­pa­ny’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance with­out hav­ing to wor­ry about the con­se­quences, as the penal­ties may not go be­yond the equiv­a­lent of a gen­tle slap in the wrist.

Al­though unions must be free to act on be­half of their mem­bers, this must hap­pen with­in the bound­aries of the law and, should they cross that le­gal line, they must be li­able for the con­se­quences, in­clud­ing fi­nan­cial ones.

This is not about be­ing vin­dic­tive but be­ing fair and treat­ing both trade unions and em­ploy­ers as equals.

When em­ploy­ers are found to have bro­ken the law, they are made to pay, quite lit­er­al­ly, to put things right. It is on­ly fair that, should the unions do the same, they ought to pay em­ploy­ers for their ac­tions to put things right, too.

And then there is the need to re­form the way trade unions are reg­u­lat­ed. The cur­rent leg­is­la­tion is woe­ful­ly in­ad­e­quate but it would al­ready be ma­jor progress to at least see it en­forced.

The cur­rent leg­is­la­tion in­cludes a role in gov­ern­ment tasked with en­sur­ing unions prop­er­ly dis­charge their gov­er­nance re­spon­si­bil­i­ties but, as we saw in the case of the PSA, it took a High Court judge to force it to pro­vide up-to-date ac­counts, sug­gest­ing those at the Min­istry of Labour re­spon­si­ble for trade union over­sight aren’t do­ing what they are sup­posed to do.

The same leg­is­la­tion has clear rules about how trade unions can en­gage in pol­i­tics so that mem­bers’ fees are not used for such pur­pos­es with­out them say­ing so.

Again, there seems to be lit­tle or no en­force­ment of this as­pect of the law.

Giv­en the very spe­cial rights trade unions have, such as its near mo­nop­oly to rep­re­sent work­ers at the In­dus­tri­al Court, fi­nan­cial trans­paren­cy and re­as­sur­ances that the right lev­el of over­sight is not niceties, they are es­sen­tial to en­sure mem­bers’ in­ter­ests and their hard-earned mon­ey are be­ing pro­tect­ed.

Those would be a good start as far as re­forms of our labour laws are con­cerned. And as Mr Ma­haraj al­so point­ed out in re­la­tion to his pro­pos­als, the soon­er these changes hap­pen, the bet­ter to help make T&T a more pros­per­ous and so­cial­ly just coun­try.