EMPLOYEES AS SHAREHOLDERS

The leaders of our trade unions will need to make a determined shift from the old and tired tactic of seeking wage and salary increases on the basis of longevity, and instead formulate positions on the basis of productivity.

In turn, it must abandon the posture of "not a man and classification must go" and develop strategies more in tune with today’s realities of globalisation and advancing technology. It is unrealistic for Trinidad and Tobago trade union leaders to peg demands to current increases in the cost of living or to salaries/wages obtaining in not dissimilar companies to those with whom they are bargaining and which have recorded large profits and are paying wages and salaries somewhat in excess of what the workers they represent are receiving.

The "not a man and sometimes classification must go" approach can, ultimately, do damage to workers’ interests as well as all too often those of the wider community. An example is that of the Telecommunications Services of Trinidad and Tobago, which today with the challenges being placed by deregulation and technology, is being required, the trade union nothwithstanding, to sever an appreciable portion of its work force.

Companies have to increasingly invest in new and expensive technology. Industrialists, manufacturers and producers — large, medium and/or small alike — have had to move away from the increasingly outdated labour intensive approach to that of capital and technology intensive. Meanwhile, globalisation has required that from the largest industries to the smallest manufacturers and producers all must be competitive, not merely with respect to other domestic industries and manufacturers but against goods and services produced in, for example, China, India and Mexico.

In turn, China’s demand for crude and steel has pushed up crude and steel prices. Nonetheless, China has not been deterred by the price and other reactions, preferring to rely on technology and its low paid. but well trained work force.

Admittedly, China, a dictatorship, has kept workers’ demands in check by methods not acceptable in Trinidad and Tobago. Another factor is that China enjoys a relatively lower cost of living than, say, Europe and North America, among others, whose products have difficulty in penetrating the Chinese market.

A mere 25 years ago United States universities, refusing to even consider the possibility of the emergence of China as a major world industrial power, were content to provide courses on the art and cuisine of China! One of them, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), had even invited interested persons to join its experts on China "on a fascinating in-depth tour of the life and environment of this vast realm."

Today, United States, European and British investors are not interested in the old patronising attitudes to China and are more concerned with in-depth studies of areas of investment in China in which they feel confident they can optimise financial returns. But I have strayed.

Low cost goods from several nations today pose a lingering challenge to Trinidad and Tobago’s domestic products, and threaten, not simply, to compete with them but to push them off the nation’s market shelves. It would be both unfair and unrealistic to ask workers in private enterprise concerns, particularly those in public companies to forego accustomed to increases without offering something beneficial in return.

What trade union leaders should seek to do, where this does not now obtain, is to negotiate Employee Stock Ownership Plans. They should seek to win at the bargaining table the acceptance by companies, the principle of stock ownership trusts as well as profit sharing and pension plans. In addition, employers again companies listed on the Stock Exchange should employ the approach, long popular in the United States, of guaranteeing bank loans applied for by employees to purchase company shares.

This would provide employees with a vested interest in their companies, and with it the knowledge that the greater their productivity the greater their share of the profits in the entreprises. Add to this mechanism, profit sharing trusts and pension plans, the employees’ literal investment in the companies will be far greater than simply their labour and, consequently, their interest in ensuring both their profitability and their ability to remain competitive.