The symbolism of last Sunday’s ‘unified’ May Day march that brought trade unions representing the GTUC and FITUG under a single umbrella has moved the local labour movement no closer to the hoped-for healing, nor, perhaps more importantly, did it do anything to conceal the fact that, in large measure, political partisanship continues to trump what the labour movement calls workers’ unity. Labour remains very much a prisoner of politics.
What the various May Day messages and the subsequent speeches at the National Park on Sunday suggested was that the trade union movement is likely to continue to mirror the political loyalties of their respective members and – in some instances – unions, and that for all the hopes of a re-unification of the movement articulated by unions on opposite sides of the political fence, real healing is still light years away.
The truth is that the May Day event was really less of a genuine expression of strength in unity than it was, perhaps, a well-intentioned but futile gesture on labour’s part to begin to salvage a reputation left in tatters by political control and manipulation. In the process labour has not only lost its clout at the bargaining table but has also demonstrated a woeful under-representation of workers’ concerns and for several years now, has lost much of its genuine rank-and-file support.
Much of what played out under last Sunday’s ever-threatening skies was reflective of the customary political theatre which, these days, corresponds with the celebration of Labour Day. The change of political administration last year and the now imminent closure of the Wales Estate would appear to have created a renewed spirit of militancy in the Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU) that was evidently manifest in its May Day presentation. On Sunday, one was left to wonder about the significance of that union’s expressed “displeasure at the disrespect shown for collective bargaining” – presumably by the incumbent political administration ‒ in circumstances where it (GAWU) had appeared decidedly less worked up over the protracted denial of the same prerogative to public servants for more than two decades under the PPP/C government.
There was, too, a blunt and arguably uncalled for coarseness in much of the May Day message released by the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) which, evidently, opted to set aside entirely the hoped-for spirit and significance of Labour Day and instead indulged in colourful tirades against the previous political administration. In truth, the union might have used its May Day message to make a much more direct case for a swift return to collective bargaining so that the vexed question of public servants’ salaries can be addressed without any further delay.
And then there was the General Secretary of the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) Lincoln Lewis, seeking – as he has been inclined to do for some time now ‒ to cast himself in the role of an even-handed arbiter in labour affairs but discovering, perhaps not altogether to his surprise, that the season of healing is yet to begin and that the return to a single May Day march cannot be equated with a restoration of trade union unity. The healing of the still politically driven divisions in the labour movement will not be accomplished simply by the kinds of presumably well-intentioned expressions of labour’s ‘independence’ and even-handedness reflected in some of what Lewis had to say on Sunday. That would surely have occurred to him having heard Sunday’s “Lincoln Jagdeo” chants in response to some of the things he said.
There were, too, on Sunday, a few other unmistakable and hopefully sobering messages for the labour movement that have a critical bearing on arresting the continual erosion of its relevance. Perhaps the most poignant of these has to do, first, with the fact that real trade union unity will continue to amount to no more than convenient rhetoric as long as the unions (and the workers) remain willing prisoners of separate political enclaves. The other important message that would have come out of the May Day event is that significant leadership change in a transforming local and global environment and one in which an ageing leadership frequently appears to lack what it takes to take labour forward can no longer be delayed. Labour, in large measure, remains imprisoned by a self-inflicted dilemma.
