THE DISPUTE BETWEEN the BIDC and the NUPW is rooted in the difficult economic situation which the island is currently facing and indeed has been facing for some time, but the way it has unfolded suggests that it is now also a political issue.
It is an economic matter of dollars and cents from both sides. The government is concerned about the deficit and the statutory board is concerned about a reduced subvention and rising expenses exacerbated by the non-payment of rents from the rented properties in its industrial estates.
The workers are concerned about the immediate issue of dollars and cents as it relates to the age at which they can be forced to retire as employees of a statutory board. This is also a matter of principle and it is complicated by competing interpretations of the relevant laws which deal with these matters.
Some say that there seems to be one retirement law for public servants of the central government and another less favourable rule, so far as mandatory retirement is concerned, for those employed by statutory corporations.
But there appears to be a potent foundational issue at the base of this confrontation which is not going to be easy to resolve, although it has to be resolved one way or the other. There seems to have been a breach of the degree of trust which should exist between the government as employer and the public officers as government employees. If so, that is a potent political issue.
Barbadians are not fool. they know that the island has experienced difficult economic times, however caused; and it appears that the idea of some people having to “go home” from government employment was grudgingly accepted following the 2013 election. True there was some protest, but assurances given then seemed to have quietened the position and an uneasy peace prevailed.
The fact that those NCC issues have not been resolved in any major way as was the expectation of most if not all of those NCC workers may be a subliminal factor at work in this dispute.
Put bluntly there appears to be a significant breakdown in how far the workers now have faith in the assurances of the government as employers. The voluntaristic approach which has characterised industrial relations in this country is rooted in a system in which there is enough negotiating or political capital on both sides that a solution thrashed out does not need the seal of the court to make it stick.
The idea that this country is more than an economy and is also a society, are words that matter even if there has not been enough emphasis on the role of the economy in ensuring the delivery of satisfaction to those who make up the society.
So this current dispute may have its origins in an economic incubator, but it is in essence a political dispute of the old-fashioned kind in which the power of the unions may well come up against the power of the government as employer.
The first step in a voluntaristic system is prior consultation about the fate of workers, and when workers rights are adversely affected before there has been consultation, what might have been a straightforward economic issue develops into a matter of politics requiring a political solution when government is the employer.
We may have reached that stage in this dispute which needs urgent, decisive attention.