NEED FOR FLEXIBILITY

Republic Bank Managing Director Ronald Harford’s caution that flexibility must be the watchword for labour and corporate houses if they are to confront successfully the new challenges which will be posed by the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was nicely put. Harford’s comment made on Wednesday evening at a symposium on a national policy for the FTAA organised by the National Union of Government and Federated Workers (NUGFW) was a diplomatic way of pointing out that labour should not be rigid with respect to needed strategies which will have to be implemented if the goods and services of companies are to remain competitive.

His: “We have to be careful that companies in the midst of intense competition and restructuring are not brought under undue strain, sending them out of business and creating unemployment” was a fair warning that sacrifices would be expected of labour. Implicit in Harford’s words was that the “adversary” which labour would have to confront was no longer merely management, but that rather it would be a case of labour and management understanding that the rules of how both negotiated with each other would change with the introduction of the FTAA. Mr Harford’s warning that the FTAA Agreement would be biased against small economies could only mean that companies would need to retool and be trim and lean to be ready for the challenges of cheap imports.

Gone will be the protection of tariff walls which had allowed for all too many companies to grow complacent and for trade unions to demand higher wages and insist with varying degrees of success on retention of existing employment levels. The whole game plan would change, and indeed it has already begun to change. Trinidad and Tobago and by extension Caricom goods would no longer, for example, in dealing with imports from the United States, be competing merely with United States manufactured products but with goods produced in Mexico, China and India by and/or on behalf of US companies. These countries do not have the same labour laws of Trinidad and Tobago, nor the same safety and environmental laws that we have.

Labour is for the most part unprotected; their poverty levels are unbelievably low and even child labour is factored into the equation, all in the name of being and remaining competitive. There are no rules as we have grown to understand them, for they are all written in water.   Either labour must make concessions, and management as well, or cheaply produced goods, cheap in every sense of the world of unbridled competition, will swamp our markets and throw tens of thousands of workers out of jobs. The “adversaries” of labour and management will no longer be the men and women on opposite sides of the industrial relations table but the investors taking advantage of the FTAA and the faceless workers in the sweatshops of Mexico and the Far East.