SAME OLD COLONISING

A spin-off of globalisation, which is adversely affecting the ability of many young Trinidadians and Tobagonians to effectively plan their future, is the growing trend by both the public and private sectors of the tactic of employment on contract for short, specified, or contract labour.

Government Ministries, Education, Housing, Sports and Youth Affairs and what have you, increasingly advertise in the Media for applications for a wide range of jobs, many requiring University degrees or other forms of specialised training. In turn, there are scores of persons employed in the private sector on contract. When the noose of globalisation tightens, and this country, for example becomes part of the soon-to-be Free Trade Area of the Americas, yet more sought after employment opportunities will be positions on contract. Simultaneously, employment opportunities, above the level of those obtaining in duty- free industrial areas, will contract. It is today’s reality in which developed countries, with the United States of America and the more powerful industrial Member States of the European Union out front, seek to dictate terms and conditions of world trade to their advantage.

A not insubstantial number of large corporations in the United States instituted a policy of contract labour years ago as one of the strategies adopted to counter the power of the trade unions, as well as to hold costs down in a highly competitive world. The corporations have for long been assisted by successive US Administrations, which sought to keep wages in check, through an Immigration policy of allocating entry quotas to foreign countries, albeit with a decided preference to those of Europe. Always, the idea has been that US-produced goods, and goods produced by American companies outside of the US, should have the competitive edge. For the past several decades there has been an explosion of developing countries, many of them in the Far East, bent on challenging the US and Europe in the international market place. This has resulted in a contracting of American and European export markets. The USA and Western Europe countered, respectively, in addition to the World Trade Organisation, with the North American Free Trade Area [NAFTA] and the development of the European Union, itself a free trade area.

NAFTA, which embraced the US, Canada and Mexico, saw the relocating and/or the establishing of American industries in Mexico, which capitalised on extremely low cost labour in the Central American country as well as tariff-free entry into the United States of the Mexico-produced US goods. The manufactures could then be sold at more competitive prices than had they been produced in the US. With the introduction of the FTAA in 2005, US-owned Mexican manufactures entering Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of CARICOM tariff-free will be in an even stronger position to challenge Trinidad and Tobago goods, both here and in the CARICOM market. In turn, although West Europe no longer has empires within the continent of Africa, companies set up in the heyday of colonialism are still, for the most part, under the control of British, French and other ‘investors’. They are still in a position to purchase raw materials in many an African country at low prices, export them to their countries, refine them and re-export the finished products to Africa, as well as export them to other areas, at relatively high prices, ensuring the same obscene profits. As Alvin Toffler tells us in his work, The Third Wave [Page 88] published in 1980, the price paid for a commodity would be deliberately kept low. If the raw material or produce had not been sold earlier [on the international market] then the initial price, under the advantageous application of the “Law of the First Price”, held. But the colonisers went further and very often used military might to ‘persuade’ the Africans to accept an absurdly low price.

Trinidadians and Tobagonians, of an earlier generation, would recall that the country’s crude oil was for many decades a victim of the grossly unjust “Law of the First Price”. Indeed, it was not until the Arab dominated Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] instituted a system under which it taxed crude as though it was being sold at a named price, that Third World oil producing nations, in particular, and including Trinidad and Tobago, were able to receive a decent price for their oil. The recent conquering of Iraq and its huge oil reserves by the United States of America and the United Kingdom, will see a downward movement of Trinidad and Tobago and world crude prices. But I have strayed. Again, it was Toffler [The Third Wave], who would stress that it was the metropolitan countries that were the principal beneficiaries of free trade, which incidentally, had been tried by Europe, on and off, for centuries. Toffler said bluntly that despite “much Imperialistic rhetoric about the virtues of free trade and enterprise”, that it was the metropolitan nations which “profited greatly from what was euphemistically called ‘imperfect competition’.” Today, Trinidad and Tobago, as so many other countries, finds itself a prisoner of globalisation. It can neither fight it nor stand aloof. This applies equally to any other CARICOM country. Yet despite, the clear threat posed by globalisation, and I should emphasise, the around-the-corner establishment of the FTAA, the English speaking Caribbean, which should have established the Caribbean Single Market and Economy several years ago still plays the ‘manana’ game. We may have severe reservations about it, but we have to accept the reality of the latest attempt by some of the major powers to ‘re-colonise’ large areas of the world. A unified Caribbean Community, English speaking and otherwise, would have been able to negotiate favourable terms of entry into the FTAA, and would have been in a better bargaining position with the World Trade Organisation, especially had it developed closer links with the two Latin American free trade areas.