THIS ARTICLE IS WRITTEN in response to the attacks against the current crop of trade union leaders in Barbados, whose ongoing national strikes are being decried as “political” attacks against the Government of Barbados.
Those seeking to reduce the current industrial impasse to a politically driven “overkill” response by an immature union leadership over the enforced early retirement of a handful of “old” workers at a small statutory corporation are either engaging in deliberate propaganda or, equally, do not understand “what is politics”.
This latter weakness is often exhibited in purely technical persons whose training blinds them to larger philosophical, historical, political and structural relations usually overarching the smaller issues. The instinct of narrow technocrats is to “pretend” that issues can be abstracted from their political contexts. More worryingly, they understand politics only in the limited sense of “partisan contestation”.
Disdain for politics
It is those types who often express a disdain for “politics” as if politics is an unnatural obstacle to the unfolding of “natural” events. “This is a legal issue for the courts to decide”, “Are the union leaders trained in industrial relations?” or “This is not a political issue”, are all examples of this anti-political instinct, reflective of an underdeveloped consciousness or deliberate distortion.
However, the current strikes in Barbados go way beyond the narrow technical and legal questions involved in the firing of ten workers, but represent an unapologetic, and indeed inevitable, political struggle against austerity. What does the struggle against austerity have to do with law or industrial relations practice? Absolutely nothing! It is essentially a political struggle.
Politics is everywhere. The supermarket shopper unable to purchase a pound of sugar is objectively locked in a political context, irrespective of his subjective understanding of the forces behind his unsweetened tea. He can resolve his problem in largely personal ways, or if he is politically conscious, he can respond in a deliberately political manner.
It is indeed a testimony of the backwardness of our democracies that we expect our trade unions to “avoid politics”, which is a practical impossibility. Equally unbelievable is that we expect the same of our academics and other groups.
It smacks of desperate propaganda to expect a trade union to operate outside of a political context or that any industrial dispute can be “non-political”. Indeed, if a political explanation were to be offered for the ongoing industrial dispute, it would be that after having spent many years unnaturally cooperating with the Government in the imposition of austerity and neo-liberal adjustment on the back of the working population, a new leadership has resolved to adopt the more natural stance of resistance in defence of workers.
It is therefore not the pro-worker “politics” of the current crop of union leaders that needs explanation, but the anti-worker “politics” of the previous group which requires scrutiny. Forward Ever!
• Tennyson Joseph is a political scientist at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, specialising in regional affairs. Email [email protected].
