Far too many people are in positions of leadership in civil society in this country who are in an unholy alliance with Government. They’re not speaking out on issues, even those that affect their own members. You have an obligation in Barbados, when you see things that are going wrong in this country to speak out . . . wherever you are in leadership positions. And if you’re not, I’d advise you to get into one. I’m not asking you to infiltrate, I’m not asking you to do anything nefarious. – David Thompson, president of the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), November 2005.
IN FAIRNESS TO THE LATE Prime Minister, the suggestion above has unfortunately been spun by political opponents, personal enemies and people who simply did not like him, into either a call for Dems to infiltrate other organisations or a deliberate party strategy.
And that is despite the fact that he explicitly says: “I’m not asking you to infiltrate, I’m not asking you to do anything nefarious.”
Thompson’s remarks at a St Michael West constituency branch meeting, came to mind this past week as nearly every constituent union in the labour movement, with the Barbados Union of Teachers (backed by its sister body in the secondary system) at point, is gearing up to fight the Government over some pressing issues and other longstanding matters that have suddenly become pressing.
Specifically, their war is with the Ministry of Education and, presumably, the substantive Minister Ronald Jones, ironically, a former teacher and, for six years, president of the BUT.
Jones is in the unique and unenviable position of having lived through the disputed issues at the level of the trade union leadership, and now at the policymaking level.
There is also a perception – some say it’s much stronger – of some at the administrative level in the Ministry of Education who appear to have abandoned, or at the very least, temporarily developed amnesia, about their own trade union roots.
The suggestion is being made that despite Thompson’s firm and explicit warning (or was that reverse psychology?) to DLPites about “infiltration”, some members and supporters have taken the opposite approach and have given life to the political spin by his opponents.
To hear those folk, not only the BUT, but the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union (BSTU), the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW) and even the venerated Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), have all been “infiltrated” by cadres of flag-waving Thompsonites, hardly to carry out a mandate he did not give them but to pursue their own personal development goals and political ambitions.
It may help to explain to those puzzled by the latest wrangling between teachers and the Ministry why longstanding quarrels with autocratic and recalcitrant heads of schools – some of whom have themselves sprung from the belly of the unions – have been allowed to fester and become a canker on the education system, while what used to be routine administrative matters like timetabling and remedial work have suddenly become a Gordian’s knot for ministry officials who only yesterday were teachers and trade unionists.
Is it that the problems have become more difficult and sophisticated to handle, or have the personalities become more ego-filled and arrogant?
The real question to be asked in all of this is whether the ruling DLP faces any political risk out of these protracted issues with the teachers and, with the other unions, over the unimaginably ignorant, callous and unfeeling way in which some of the 3 000 sent home in the disastrous home-grown IMF-style programme are still being treated a year later.
One of the challenges faced by both parties when unions are linked, either by reality or perception, to political parties, is the struggle to determine whose interests will be placed first: their membership or their political associations’.
Will the unions secure the future of their membership, or will they allow the leadership to put partisan interests at the forefront?
And with the political party, will the leadership secure the hold on office and risk a fissure with the unions whose membership comprise a sizeable number of party diehards and supporters?
Over the years, we’ve seen some trade unionists/politicians having to make difficult choices when the question was finally put: can you serve the god that is the union membership, and the mammon that is the political party, at the same time?
We need look no further than Sir Frank Walcott, the BWU hero, who won three elections between 1951 and 1961 as an Independent, but promptly lost in 1966 when he ran on a DLP ticket. He would win in 1971 with the introduction of the single member system but lost again in 1976 and quit elective politics.
And the fortunes of the BWU trio in the House between 1986 and 1994 are still fresh in the national consciousness.
• Albert Brandford is an independent political correspondent. Email [email protected].
