Dear Editor,

I refer to the article “CCWU says 5% increase makes workers poorer” (SN 8th January, 2007). This continuous posturing of leaders to blame others and not take responsibilities for their actions is destroying the soul of this country. The consequence of this behaviour is that it becomes more important to remind these leaders that the society is taking note. CCWU’s behaviour can be cast in this mode.

The GTUC team tasked with the responsibility for bringing NAACIE, GPSU and GAWU back to the fold includes Messrs Grantley Culbard and Roy Hughes of the CCWU and Mr. Carvil Duncan of the GLU. It was Mr. Carvil Duncan in his address to the GTUC 2004 Delegates Conference who reported that the GAWU and NAACIE are not interested in returning to the GTUC fold. This fact can be corroborated from Mr. Carvil Duncan’s 2004 President’s Report. GAWU and NAACIE left the fold in 1999 after they refused to support the GTUC call for a 72 hour national strike in protest at the shooting and harming of public servants by the police. Now CCWU is using the media to give another story and feign innocence/ignorance.

What is disheartening is the fact that GLU and CCWU are straddling a relationship with FITUG and GTUC. This action indicates that these two unions are inconsistent in their principles and are prepared to compromise same in the interesting of serving another order. Of course this cannot be serving the workers’ interests. For this to be so CCWU and GLU have to unequivocally get GAWU and NAACIE to condemn the police shooting and injuring of public servants in 1999. Allowing GAWU and NAACIE to get away with this behaviour while in FITUG’s fold means that CCWU and GLU support the1999 police shooting and injuring of workers.

CCWU’s condemnation of the government’s 5 percent increase is nothing more than lip service. This tactic employed by GAWU and NAACIE, now followed by GLU and CCWU, is false pretence not genuine concern. On one hand GAWU condemns the government but Mr. Komal Chand, GAWU president and PPP MP will sit in parliament and support the government’s excesses.

If CCWU and other FITUG unions are serious in their condemnation of the government’s imposed 5 percent increase let them join with GPSU in their struggle to have the Collective Bargaining process respected. CCWU and GLU should stop paying lip service and doing public relations stunts about their relationship with GTUC and their views of the government’s excesses. The trade union leadership, where FITUG wants to exclude the leadership of Messrs Roy Hughes, Carvil Duncan, Komal Chand, Kenneth Joseph, and Grantley Culbard, must take some responisbility for the labour mess. FITUG unions must acknowledge their inconsistencies, self serving and unprincipled behaviour that have become the unions’ modus operandi. CCWU disenchantment lies in the fact that they cannot, with a clear conscience, serve two masters at the same time and get away with it.

Yours faithfully,

Martin Roberts