For­mer jour­nal­ist and In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor, who is al­so Di­rec­tor of the Lloyd Best In­sti­tute, Suni­ty Ma­haraj, is ar­gu­ing that it is left to be seen what im­pact for­mer trade union lead­ers who now have min­is­te­r­i­al po­si­tions in the new Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Gov­ern­ment will have.

“In our sys­tem, the on­ly pow­er­ful per­son is the Prime Min­is­ter and you just put some­body out of the Cab­i­net to­mor­row if they do not com­ply. It is as easy as that. It comes back to the whole con­struct of the con­sti­tu­tion and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pow­er,” she said.

On Wednes­day, Ma­haraj spoke at a sem­i­nar on the sig­nif­i­cance of May Day for Labour in T&T at the Cipri­ani Col­lege of Labour and Co-op­er­a­tive Stud­ies, Val­sayn.

She was re­spond­ing to a ques­tion from an au­di­ence mem­ber who queried what the con­tri­bu­tion of for­mer trade union­ists-turned-politi­cians would be.

For­mer Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) pres­i­dent, Leroy Bap­tiste is now Labour Min­is­ter, while for­mer Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers' Union (CWU) Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al, Clyde El­der, is now Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Pub­lic Util­i­ties.

While Ma­haraj laughed and said maybe she was be­ing “face­tious” and it is ob­vi­ous what she means, Po­lit­i­cal Leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) David Ab­du­lah, who was al­so a mem­ber of the pan­el at the fo­rum, in­ter­ject­ed and told her that she was jus­ti­fied in mak­ing that point.

“One min­is­te­r­i­al of­fice does not pow­er make. We saw that cer­tain­ly, be­tween 2010 and 2015, al­though my own view is that more could have been done in that pe­ri­od and that op­por­tu­ni­ty was re­al­ly not grasped. The 2015 to 2020 pe­ri­od…there was no im­pe­tus or in­ter­est by the Cab­i­net to pass any labour leg­is­la­tion. For­mer labour min­is­ter Jen­nifer Bap­tiste-Primus had tonnes of con­sul­ta­tions…and noth­ing hap­pened. Not a sin­gle piece of labour leg­is­la­tion was ac­tu­al­ly tabled in Par­lia­ment in nine and a half years.”

How­ev­er, Ab­du­lah be­lieves that with this new Gov­ern­ment, there is a “slight­ly dif­fer­ent dy­nam­ic.”

“I am not sug­gest­ing that labour is hold­ing the reins now, but there are now three min­is­ters who have come from the trade union move­ment, so it is go­ing to be an in­ter­est­ing thing to see what emerges in terms of labour leg­is­la­tion. The trade union move­ment and oth­ers in so­ci­ety have to now keep in­sist­ing that what­ev­er was com­mit­ted to in terms of labour law re­form is in fact im­ple­ment­ed.”

Ma­haraj then added to what Ab­du­lah said and not­ed that there is yet an­oth­er dif­fer­ence with the trade union move­ment’s in­put with this Gov­ern­ment, as the PSA seemed to have ne­go­ti­at­ed the terms of con­di­tions of their in­volve­ment with the UNC be­fore they got in­volved in the cam­paign.

“The in­ter­ven­tion of the Pres­i­dent of the PSA is very im­por­tant and I am on­ly judg­ing from her plat­form ap­pear­ances. She clear­ly ne­go­ti­at­ed the terms of as­so­ci­a­tion with the po­lit­i­cal par­ty be­fore. The most no­table thing she did was every sin­gle time she spoke, she made it clear to the par­ty she is sup­port­ing and to the pub­lic, the terms of that which is a min­i­mum of ten per cent (wage in­crease) and no Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty.”