To say all is well on the labour front these days is nothing short of wishful thinking.
Few would deny that the decision made official by Robert “Bobby” Morris last month to opt for early retirement from the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) in favour of an ambassadorship amounts to the BWU’s loss and CARICOM’s gain.
As the new Barbados Ambassador to CARICOM, Bobby is now focused on, among other things, carving out a fishing agreement with Trinidad.
His obvious skills as a negotiator, which have left many a private sector head honcho shaking in the boots over the past three to four decades, will no doubt be put to the test.
However, his departure, which surprisingly has been allowed to take place without even a whisper of acknowledgement from the union he has so ably represented, leaves the BWU with some very large shoes to fill.
The pending retirement of Bobby’s former boss Sir Roy Trotman, who is also close to retirement, will indubitably be no less easy to fathom.
Herein lies the dilemma, which was forcefully brought home this week during the CBC strike.
It is interesting to note the CBC management’s posture to the BWU’s junior negotiators who were told to go back and bring Sir Roy.
The union boss himself has been forced to acknowledge a number of the threats that now befall the labour movement. Speaking in the Senate yesterday he said: “Absenteeism is a curse in this country today. It is an epidemic for which all of us are in part responsible. In the same way that unpunctuality is an epidemic . . . and all of us in this room and beyond . . . are equally guilty of infolding these two evils to our bosoms and nurturing them so that they can reach the levels that they are today.
“They didn’t suddenly become creatures, they were nurtured overtime for whatever different reasons they may be.”
Sir Roy said that the worker was “encultured, patterned, groomed, guided to fall away from all of those good and noble ideals that he or she as a person had at the point of entry into the workforce”.
Indeed the signs are very worrying.
Equally worrying is the situation at LIAT, which led to sickout action by pilots over the past two days.
While no one should attempt to condone bad behaviour on the part of any employee, management of LIAT must have been expecting that its decision to fire the lead pilot spokesman Captain Michael Blackburn would have led to a grounding of the regional carrier.
Therefore the question has to be asked what was management thinking? Certainly not about the impact on the passengers who were left stranded with nowhere to go.
These are indeed worrying times.
