As we prepare to observe Labour Day, all Guyanese – not just members of the trade unions – need to reflect on what exactly is the point behind the rallies and the marches by the workers decked out in red and white. It has often been the case that after performing an activity for a number of years, we begin to repeat it reflexively, out of sheer habit, with no real consciousness of what the action was originally intended to achieve. One may discover that with the passage of time and changes in circumstances, the event has become passé and indeed irrelevant. Then again, it may be even more relevant and needs highlighting.
It may be useful to note that almost all of our people in our One Guyana, save for the Indigenous Peoples, were brought here to labour. The Europeans who exploited their labour on the plantations were never more than a comparative handful. In a sense, therefore, “we are all of labour”. None of us would deny the harsh – indeed inhumane – conditions under which the early labourers toiled, and would not be surprised that our history is in essence a timeline punctuated with periodic outbursts against the exploitation. The quotidian sullen antagonism merely served as a backdrop.
While one would not want to equate the conditions under which our forebears laboured with those in the colonial “mother” country, the former were not exactly a bed of roses. By the middle of the 19th century, trade unions had been formed in Britain to agitate for better working conditions, and by 1871, they were granted official recognition. It is to the credit of our forebears that they followed suit here not long after. We can be proud that Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow formed the very first officially recognised trade union in the entire British Commonwealth right here in 1919. It does not detract an iota from his achievement to note that he was assisted by the British trade unionists.
And just as the latter group had discovered that they needed direct access to the legislative system so that their demands could be enshrined in the law of the land, and formed the Labour Party, our local labour agitators did likewise. So, our trade union movement gave birth to our modern political movements. Both Jagan and Burnham were members and leaders of unions that demanded much more radical changes in the status quo of working conditions than had the older traditional reformist politicians.
But out of this early (and entirely appropriate) radical beginning, some trade unions have, to a large degree, retained the confrontational and agitational style that characterised their early modus operandi, but in the services of political rather than labour interests. The question that we implicitly posed in the beginning is whether such a style is appropriate in the world in which we have now found ourselves? We posit that, because of local and global reasons, it is inappropriate. Locally, there must be an inevitable recalibration of our economy to deal with the diversification funded by oil revenues. The ongoing recalibration of globalisation occasioned by Trump’s initiatives has created a scenario in which capital and investments would flow to countries that create the least disruption in operation.
This is not to imply that unions have to abandon working for improvement in workers’ benefits and wages. This implies that that work has to modify the rhetoric and reality of war: “struggle”, “fight”, “shut-down” etc. especially when solely political agendas are being pushed. In this globalised world, labour would have to conceive of their role as being partners with the managers of companies in order to literally deliver the goods as efficiently as possible. We cannot cut our noses to spoil our faces. Just as rioting became irrelevant after not simply the legalisation of trade unions, but the official acceptance of workers’ right to a living wage, so, too, must the confrontational approach be moderated, because unions should now understand that even that living wage can disappear overnight if they do not factor in global conditions when making local demands.
