THE EXTENT to which Prime Minister Freundel Stuart has come around to expressing his appreciation for the value of the Social Partnership in Barbados is not just welcome on all sides.
It is revealing of how holding office can alter one’s perspective. Distance from a particular issue often affords comfort. Proximity offers no such luxury. It imposes an obligation to move away from the realm of rhetoric and idealism into the range of reality.
Such has been our Prime Minister’s new actuality.
When Stuart was of the firm view that the Social Partnership compromised the trade union movement, he was an Opposition member of the Senate and was true to that role.
For a long time, Stuart held to his conviction that any alliance between the state, labour and capital which brought them together “behind closed doors” as he put it, was “never a viable option”. In other words, he was of the view that such a pact was, in and of itself, infra dig (abbreviation for infra dignitatem) because it compromised labour.
He contented that such an association was unbecoming of an independent body like a trade union.
About ten years ago he also regarded it as “a threat to our democracy”. Speaking on the floor of the Senate in 2007, he told the upper house that: “Our democracy has been considerably whittled down by this arrangement, and all that’s happening is that labour has now awakened to the realisation that it’s being duped.”
He also said he wanted “to dissociate myself from any move that seeks to supplant or replace the publicly expressed wishes of the people in a general election”.
He seemed to be of the view that the Social Partnership was a method that could have undermined the programme of a governing party and so he opposed it.
But on Monday when he chaired this tripartite assembly, his words were oh so different and oh so much more soothing to the ear of all who listened: “The Social Partnership was put periodically under stresses of various kinds, but the maturity, the insight and the faith in the future, led all the social partners to see the value of sticking together rather than allowing fissiparous or splintering tendencies to get the better of us.”
Congratulations to the partners for their enduring faith and to the Prime Minister on his recent conversion.
