Informed observers are unlikely to dwell for any length of time on last Friday’s ‘engagement’ between a ministerial team that included Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Senior Minister in the Ministry of Finance Dr. Ashni Singh and a Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) contingent led by its longstanding General Secretary, Lincoln Lewis, ostensibly to discuss the country’s 2024 budget, specifically, what’s in it for the workers.
The report on the engagement in the Guyana Chronicle of October 7, describing the meeting as a display of the government’s “consultative approach to governance”, would also have been given short shrift by enlightened readers, accustomed as they have become to the practice of the state-run media unfailingly doing the bidding of the incumbent political administration. Just a few days earlier, the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) had pointed out that government had earlier bypassed the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU), engaging instead with a more modest group of seniors in the profession in discourses on upping emoluments for Heads and Deputy Heads of schools… nothing unusual there, really. The GPSU itself has become a frequent target for state ridicule, much of which, many feel, has been brought on by the Union’s internal operating haphazardness.
That the trade union movement has become progressively enfeebled over several decades is a truism which not even its incumbent leadership can deny. Politics aside, there are those who feel that the movement has done a fair bit in terms of dealing itself self-inflicted wounds, arising out of its own leadership deficiencies and a general failure to progressively upgrade its competencies to respond to the evolving requirements of being an integral part of an evolving industrial relations culture. Particularly, there are those who would argue that labour has, decidedly, been weighed and found wanting in terms of engaging successive political administrations in Guyana, a circumstance that has caused the movement to arrive at a point of simply not being taken seriously. Labour’s internal affairs too, including its lack of a leadership succession plan that turned veterans into dinosaurs, has meant that there has been little in the way of infusion of new strategic thinking to help the movement stay abreast of the times.
The Trades Union movement’s inability to replace functionaries whose time had come and gone has been one of its key weaknesses. Over time, those shortcomings have become increasingly difficult to correct. All of this derives from a dinosaur mentality which, over many years, has caused the Trade Union movement to see some virtue in leadership entrenchment which is probably the reason why the movement has not been known to place a great deal of emphasis on training associated with succession planning. This dinosaur mentality has come back to haunt the movement with a vengeance, seriously compromising its operating effectiveness.
To return to the matter of last Friday’s meeting at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, labour would hardly have gone into the engagement chomping at the bit, set to overturn the mountain of losses that it has had to endure over the years. The government, on the other hand, would have entered the engagement with an understanding that it would have already had all of its bases covered. Few workers were likely to have been painstakingly monitoring the engagement, in the hope of good tidings, their dispositions long conditioned by precedent. Conversely, last Friday, the government, with a handful of its hardened veterans on its side of the table, would have come into last Friday’s discourses locked and loaded. A much broader swathe of observer opinion would probably have seen the talks as a kind of ‘for appearances sake’ engagement to which government could hark back at some time in the future to counter accusations of failure to engage labour on critical worker issues.
There is, as well, the likelihood that government may have decided, again for appearances sake, to press a decidedly adequately equipped public treasury into making a few generous gestures that might earn it a helping of bragging rights that may come in handy, politically, that is, down the road. To set aside last Friday’s meeting momentarily, a clearer understanding of the extant circumstances of the Trades Union movement is necessary if one is to appreciate the difficult wider environment in which it currently functions. To acquire that understanding, there is need to address some poignant realities that include the drastic denuding of the leadership of the movement, primarily through age, but perhaps more importantly, through the failure of Trades Unions and the TUC as a whole to fashion their leadership succession plans around a suitable training curriculum.
The reality here is that dinosaurism has always been one of the trade union movement’s chronic maladies. Here, it is worth mentioning that labour has failed to effect an across-the-board impactful leadership change in more than two decades, this, as an extension of a glaring inclination to not be concerned, in the least, with succession planning. One serious consequence of labour’s leadership crisis is that the movement has become hard-pressed to keep pace with what has been, particularly over the past five years or so, a more complex, more demanding industrial relations agenda, with the advent of oil and gas as critical economic and industrial relations issues. Truth be told, up to this time, the labour movement has failed to fashion an industrial relations agenda to meet the needs of what has become a near full-blown petro-economy. If it is to do so, the labour movement will have to develop new competencies that cannot be acquired overnight. That gives it an enormous amount of catching up to do.
To return to the issue of last Friday’s talks in the context of what the 2024 budget will look like, even if the government, for its own image management purposes, makes a few positive gestures to labour, around the table, those are decidedly unlikely to alter the balance of power that is weighted heavily in the favour of a political administration which, up to this time, has shown no real signs of a preparedness to work wholeheartedly with the labour movement. Frankly, it might well have gotten around to thinking that it has gotten to a stage where relations between government and labour are not at all as critical as they have been made out to be.
