Opposition Senator Freundel Stuart sees something fundamentally wrong with what he calls the “philosophical monstrosity” known as the tripartite Social Partnership. – DAILY NATION, August 2007.
I’M NOT SURE if the Prime Minister can, or would be willing, to share when he had the Saul to Paul conversion moment that led to the 180° on the Social Partnership.
Indeed, not only does he now have surprisingly fulsome praise for the tripartite arrangement involving the public and private sectors and labour, but he feels it is a “closed shop and should be broadened to include entities such as the church, the cooperative movement and NGOs.
“It has been a closed shop, and the stage is going to have to be reached when we look back at its composition to see how best we can make it more inclusive so that the national discourse is broadened on issues that touch and concern people across the society.”
Parenthetically, I’m also not sure that the expression “closed shop” usually referring to union membership prior to employment, is apposite for a three-way consensus mechanism.
Nonetheless, it is also to my certain knowledge that constituent members of Civil Society, functioning under the umbrella of “labour” in the arrangement such as NGOs, credit unions and the church – broadly – have been invited to meetings of the Social Partnership.
Advice from some who have worked at the heart of the arrangement since it was created in 1993 is that it should never become unwieldly, but should be able to evolve to address challenges as they arise.
Former Prime Minister Owen Arthur noted recently in Jamaica, which is setting up its own version, is that provision was made for inclusion of the media, NGOs and the religious organisations as active members, “but it would have been difficult to conceive how an open-ended Social Partnership could achieve the pragmatic results expected of it”.
You would recall that this tripartite core group emerged out of consultations through bipartite social dialogue in the early 1990s during the economic downturn that led to a structural adjustment programme imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that faced hostility from the public not seen since the 1937 Disturbances.
The records point out that although the trade union movement served as the nucleus of the general protests which arose, employers’ bodies and civil society also participated.
Opposition politics is the best game in town.
Stuart’s problem with the Social Partnership, whose details were midwifed in that first Protocol, ironically, by the man whom he would later succeed as Prime Minister, David Thompson, related to what he felt was the undue influence of the private sector. He told the Senate, in a May 2007 debate, there was something fundamentally wrong with the arrangement, going on to describe it as the greatest threat to Barbados’ hard-won democracy secured in the wake of the 1937 Riots and concretised in universal adult suffrage in 1951.
Stuart charged it was never a viable arrangement and its cracks were beginning to show, since one could see how the owners of capital and Government benefited from the partnership while no one could say how the workers gained.
“Our democracy has been consistently whittled down by this arrangement,” he added, “and all that’s happening is that labour has now awakened to the realisation that it’s being duped.”
Whether Stuart had an epiphany, or his views on the partnership evolved, we may never know.
But they clearly changed to the point where he told May Day celebrants this year: “I believe the Social Partnership is good for Barbados and has been good for Barbados. It has had its problems. I have not always been pleased for the entire life of the Social Partnership with everything that happened with it, but on any objective evaluation, Barbados has been better off with the Social Partnership than it has been without it.”
Perhaps, the Prime Minister could tell us whether the road to Damascus is located anywhere between George Street and Bay Street?
Albert Brandford is an independent political correspondent. Email albertbrandford@nationnews.com