JOBS ON CONTRACT RISE IN AGE OF GLOBALISATION

There has been an explosion of jobs on contract in the public and private sectors as both areas, in an effort to remain competitive in the international market place, proceed to make needed adjustments demanded by the changed situation brought about by globalisation. Whether they are private sector jobs at billion-dollar high-tech plants requiring highly specialised skills or those of a secretarial, research, planning or technical nature in the public sector, scores of newly created jobs do not and will not in our lifetime carry with them age-old security of tenure. Most of the contract jobs are for three years, and although the contracts may be renewable the permanence, once a feature, is today history.

And contrary to the belief by many, including some trade union leaders, the need to keep down labour costs in the public sector is no less important than in the private sector. The trade unions, whose demands for salary and wage increases in the permanent establishment continue, increasingly, to bear no relation either to productivity or to the changed circumstance of globalisation, affect to ignore that conditions are no longer the same. Many public sector departments are overstaffed and productivity is low, yet all too many trade union leaders in Trinidad and Tobago in the 21st century hold on to unrealistic “market unionism,” that of demanding more pay for less and less work, a thinking long rejected in the more developed societies.

It is a political sword of Damocles held over the Government in power. Politicians for years have tended to react to this, in the perhaps mistaken belief that either they yield to the demands or there could be a withdrawal of enthusiasm come the next General Election. Admittedly, there are many trade union leaders, who will not engage in this monstrous “barter,” and who may genuinely believe that their demands are reasonable and well within the public sector’s and private sector’s ability to pay. There is the added ingredient of rising expectations. Late Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr Eric Williams, had faced this problem. Having slammed colonialism, and correctly so, as an oppressor of the broad mass of people, and argued, as Dr Pat Solomon had done before him, that with a more representative form of Government and, ultimately, with Independence the people (read workers) would be treated justly Dr Williams, however inadvertently, created a monster.

It was the same problem that Kwame Nkrummah had created in Ghana and Jawarhalal Nehru in India, the problem of conveying the impression that the pie, which under colonialism, had allowed for one group being relatively wealthy and the other groups poor, could if shared more or less equitably make all happy. This had just the right appeal from political platforms, but the truth then as now was that even though all could enjoy an improvement in their standard of living, with an appreciable number much higher than under colonialism the answer lay in planning, in the accessing of skills and in being realistic. In addition, there would always be external factors that would determine how quickly, if at all, a country, particularly a Third World country, progressed both economically and socially.

By 1965, the year of the creation of the Industrial Stabilisation Act (which would later be replaced by the Industrial Relations Act, 1972) Dr Williams had recognised this. It must have been painful for him, but he had to hobble labour, restrain it from strike action, which had begun to frighten overseas investors, who had feared a threat to their profits. A group of foreign investors had threatened Dr Williams that if he could not do anything about the then upsurge in strikes that not only would they withdraw their investments, they would seek to dissuade potential investors from coming here. One of the group was the newspaper magnate, Lord Thomson, then owner of the Trinidad Publishing Company Limited. Dr. Williams, who had been the undisputed leader of the social revolution of 1955-56, would be exposed and unjustly so, by 1965, to cricticisms that he had become the architect of the counter revolution. Dr Williams’ failure to transform the society in dollar and job terms had not been because he had not tried, but that the laying down of the foundation and the building of the structure of economic and social change had been subject to factors external to Trinidad and Tobago.

The price of sugar and the revenue from it, save in 1964/65 had been negligible. Revenue from crude had been much lower than it should have been because of the artificially depressed price of US$2.60 a barrel. The discovery of natural gas off Trinidad’s East Coast had been made only a few years earlier. In turn, the price of crude, like that of sugar, had been dictated not by Trinidad and Tobago and other oil producing countries, but by investors in the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Europe. The Organisation of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) would in late 1973 effect dramatic change to this thinking and to revenues from crude. Today, combined with unusually high demands for crude by China and what have you, the price of petroleum has soared yet further. Additionally, revenues from natural gas have been extremely favourable because of the demand for (Trinidad and Tobago) liquefied natural gas in the United States and for natural gas internationally.

But the revenues from gas and crude by themselves are not enough to sustain the economy as well as provide for needed employment levels. We have to be realistic as well. If labour leaders demand salary increases based primarily on the prevailing high prices for crude and the price for natural gas, will a major reversal of our fortunes caused by a drop in the price of crude and natural gas, due to lowered demand not place scores of jobs at risk? And when, we have exhausted our crude and natural gas reserves, what then? Jobs in small manufacturers and agricultural produce, as I keep warning, are under threat from globalisation. Both the public and private sectors, not wishing to have long and costly confrontation with trade unions on the issue of jobs and salaries and/or wages, are placing a number of these jobs out of the reach of trade unions, by having them on contract for stipulated periods. Soon the numbers of jobs on contract will grow. But this is a fact of life if we are to be competitive through, inter alia, keeping down costs.

This is not to be construed as being counter revolution, but an understanding that either we continuously adapt ourselves to globalisation and the strategies of the front runners of globalisation or thousands of jobs in the non-energy sector will be under threat. And the domino reaction will cause a greater threat to yet more jobs. Some of our trade union leaders simply cannot continue to act as ostriches, as though globalisation does not exist, and that we can act out the fantasy that we are masters of our own destiny.