ULRIC SEALY HAS dedicated the past 27 years of his life to the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), serving in many positions and as principal of the BWU Labour College since 1996.
He is considering relinquishing at the end of the year.
“I am a tired man; I have been working since 1965,” Sealy said as he spoke about his years with the BWU.
Sealy, who became the union’s assistant general secretary/tutor in 1985, said he has been through several years of unrest and has seen some of the turning points and transformation periods in the 1990s that caused a social revolution in the island.
However, he noted that when he joined the BWU, it was much like it is today because it has always been strong, but there was no Social Partnership.
“The consciousness of cooperation between employers and workers was not as high as it is today, but the union still made its way in terms of getting people organized. Those were the days when topics such as workers’ participation were the core thing, and worker determination,” Sealy said.
He recalled that then the guiding principle was that workers be involved in running companies. They were on boards and on works councils. Unions jointly ran plants with corporations and management and were represented at the highest decision-making level.
This, he said, had achieved some gains, but the need for training was always compelling, as workers needed to know matters pertinent to their development.
As he spoke about his princilpalship at the Labour College, Sealy said he had always seen the need to develop and had worked to stimulate that interest in training.
He said a lot had changed with regard to how programmes were taught over the years, but the BWU had always kept the core
trade union programmes – collective bargaining, grievance handling, leadership and communication – which all workers need to know.
To encompass the growing needs and deal with the ever-changing workplace, the college has included topics such as regional integration, international financial institutions and, stemming from grievance handling, has branched out into the area of conflict resolution and problem solving.
In recalling the success of the college, Sealy said that the programmes continued to be well received because businesses were still keen on having their workers trained.
He said that what had remained important was keeping the college relevant to society and the trends emerging in the workplace. What he would like to see – and it is being worked on – is the college offering accredited programmes.
He said the current programmes were not like Barbados Community College’s or the University of the West Indies’.
“There are some [people] who would like to see some degree of recognition [for doing] the programmes. So that is the kind of route that ultimately we would like to go,” Sealy said, but stressed that this was not the original intention.
The college was to educate workers on matters that affected them as workers, citizens and people, he said, so people who wanted to see the college reach academic heights had missed that point.
“But as society demands and the stage that we are at, it will compel it to go that way,” Sealy said.
