Celebrating Labour Day in disunity

While such disunity may not be significant in other types of organisations, the split signals the hollowness of rhetoric which calls on workers of the world to unite. This inability of the trade unions to reach agreement on fundamental issues is not merely a matter of various leaders wanting to be the only man-rats in their particular holes. This is a factor, of course, but the more pertinent one is the growing irrelevance of the trade union movement as a whole.

Trade union leaders, without quite admitting their loss of influence, blame this on things like the machinations of the "neo-liberal capitalist agenda" of the "military-industrial complex" of Group of Seven, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank — all undergirded, of course, by the grand dragon of them all: globalisation.

But there are more pertinent factors which explain the present-day sidelining of the labour movement. The first is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, which proved that a collectivist economic system was simply unworkable. Trade union leaders should have learned from that, but instead the vast majority of them, to this day, continue to cleave to leftist ideologies which do not work economically or politically.

Which leads to the second factor — ordinary people began to realise that the workers of the world who had the highest pay and the best working conditions were those in capitalist systems. These countries also had trade unions but, significantly, the unions in the prosperous nations were never as militant as the unions in less prosperous countries. It was as though the secret to worker benefits lay in cooperation between management and labour, not conflict.

It is not that capitalism is a perfect system. Indeed, the very nature of market forces requires a responsible labour movement, in order to maintain social balance. This is especially so given the particular history of the Caribbean, where the working classes were formed specifically for exploitation and the elite classes did not attain their authority through even the merit of superior physical and intellectual vigour.

But, even in its heyday in the oil boom 1970s, the trade union movement, despite its grand rhetoric, never saw itself as having a wider goal than getting higher wages and more privileges for its members. Aided and abetted by a lax government, trade unions were a decisive factor in helping create the poor work ethic which bedevils the society to this day.

But this day is a globalised day. The labour leaders might not like it, but that is the reality. And the challenge they face is how to make themselves relevant — which means showing workers how they can best take advantage of the opportunities offered by globalisation, foreign investment, and free trade, and how to deal with the inevitable disadvantages that comes with these things. Unfortunately, we expect to hear little along these lines from the platforms of the various union leaders who will be giving speeches on this Labour Day.