IT COULD HARDLY have been a coordinated strategy. Most likely a signifcant coincidence.
I am reflecting aloud on the separate statements in Monday’s Daily Nation attributed to Prime Minister Fruendel Stuart, and Mr Alex McDonald, chairman of Barbados Private Sector Association, on the prevailing unsettled industrial relations situation in this country.
While the Prime Minister was engaged in a mix of verbal cracking of heads and appealing to those involved in the spreading industrial relations unrest, Mr McDonald was more focused on pleading “for calm” by the principal parties involved in the prevailing showdown between Government and major union organisations.
The genesis of the spreading and unsettling industrial relations scenes that include employees of Customs and sanitation services with grievances of their own, need no repetition here.
Suffice it to say, however, that the clarity and firmness evident in the Prime Minister’s latest statement in relation to the prevailing law governing the right of a state corporation, or the Central Government as a whole, to retire employees from the age of 60, requires a straightforward response from the relevant trade unions without “water in their mouths”, as the saying goes.
As workers themselves, whether in the public or private sector, journalists would naturally be sympathetic to employees who suddenly find themselves being relinquished from employment because of the age factor. In this instance, those 60 and over being retrenched by the Barbados Investment and Development Corporation. But this is not a “shot-in-the-dark” development.
A question of relevance here, and related also to observations in the statement from the Private Sector Association, is whether officials of the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados (CTUSAB) and the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) have sought to be fully engaged prior to the latter adopting positions that seem to have widened the differences with the Government as well as upsetting the private sector, another vital partner of this country’s once praised Social Partnership structure as a model for more than the CARICOM region.
Indeed, it would be most useful to learn of the specific initiatives, if any, exercised by the tripartite social partnership mechanism, from the time there was the initial manifestation of coming industrial relations troubles. As chair of this “partnership”, did the Government consider calling a special meeting, presided over either by its rather engaging Minister of Industry and Commerce, Donville Inniss, or the seemingly ever-smiling Minister of Labour, Dr Esther Byer, if the Prime Minister himself could not be available – for whatever reason?
Indeed, it is quite surprising that in the face of deteriorating industrial relations, there appears to be no official interest on the part of Prime Minister Stuart’s administration for a special meeting of the Social Partnership to seek an enlightened resolution to the serious industrial relations scene that could only worsen Barbados’ social and economic problems.
It is encouraging that both Prime Minister Stuart and the Private Sector Association’s chairman McDonald thought it necessary to make the statements they separately did at the weekend.
But their arguments and pleas seem destined to be stuck in the proverbial mud unless all relevant parties get together, the sooner the better, under the umbrella of the tripartite Social Partnership.
In the feisty mood, Prime Minister Stuart pointed in his statement to unidentified “elements” in the Barbadian society whose “only interest is their urge to win, or to say they have won” over the national interest.
Well, perhaps we may yet have a response, collective or otherwise, from these unidentified “elements” evidently located within the local labour movement.
In the meanwhile, in the often claimed “national interest”, it may be useful for the Barbadian public to be informed if there is to be the much overdue meeting of the social partners’ representatives – Government, trade unions and private sector – any time soon.
• Rickey Singh is a noted Caribbean journalist.
