Dear Editor,
I have often wondered what would have been today’s Guyana, if there was not the tragic splitting of the People’s Progressive Party on that sad day in February 1955. At the gravesite of the Enmore Martyrs, some time in the nineteen eighties, speaking as the representative of the TUC I had called for a rebirth of the spirit of ’53.
That call was made because I honestly believed that unless there was a cohesive working class movement dedicated to the task of hastening the economic emancipation of the working class man and woman of Guyana, our country would continue to remain in the doldrums. I also held the view that the Trade Union Movement could not have been without blame for the declining living standards and the exodus of our skilled personnel.
Editor, the movement since the early 1970s, has lost sight of both its role and its responsibilities. I have included responsibilities, for apart from its customary industrial function, it also has its civic responsibilities. This is so, for I often argued that a well organised Trade Union Movement is the only brake in the hands of the people capable of curbing the excessiveness of a government. That I contend is a major civic responsibility of the movement, and it is for this reason that politicians with totalitarian intentions first seek to subvert the Trade Union Movement.
The subversion of which I speak, is accomplished by creating dissensions within the movement, pitting membership against leadership, and vice versa, leadership against membership, together with discriminatingly granting favours and concessions, fostering ethnic and class antagonisms, all of which have been the Guyana experience since 1975, and the strike in the bauxite industry, called by the Guyana Mine Workers Union. The end result was a Trade Union Movement bitterly divided and much worse – one that had lost sight of both its objectives and responsibilities.
Editor, I well remember in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the leadership of the bauxite unions was being pilloried, some members of the TUC Executive Council, declared themselves to be political animals; thus like Pilate they washed their hands thereby contributing to the subversion of the movement, all at a time when the real wages of their members were declining at the rate of 11% per annum and the per capita income of our country was declining to a level at which we were ranked amongst the lowest in South America inclusive of Caricom, with the United Nations classifying us among the lower income countries with widespread and persistent poverty.
How long must this continue? It is time that the leadership of the Trade Union Movement becomes alive to both its role and its responsibilities.
Guyana has nowhere to go so long as the working political movement remains fractured, the Trade Union Movement divided, and the people unaware or unconcerned that the power that their leaders possess was given to them by the people and can be taken away. The spirit of ’53 must be rekindled, with the political movement, the Trade Union Movement and the peasantry all working together toward a common goal as it was in the PPP of 1950. The people must demand this.
Yours faithfully,
Leslie Melville
