EWART WILLIAMS WAS RIGHT

The inference and/or argument of some of the trade unionists that the current high international prices realised today for crude oil and natural gas should be the yardstick employed for determining wage and salary increases, was unfortunate.

The need for increased productivity is applicable both to the public sector and the private sector. In turn, should Government peg public sector wages and salaries to the country’s returns from the price of crude or natural gas on the world market, it would not only be unreasonable, but there would be demands from unions representing private sector workers for not dissimilar increases. This would be understandable but wholly unrealistic. All businesses must be productive and earn profits and demonstrates an in the black potential or they will go under. Michael Annisette, President General of the Seamen and Waterfront Workers’ Trade Union, a union which formed a company to service the port of Port- of- Spain a few years ago is in an excellent position to advise his fellow trade union leaders of the ongoing need for increased productivity.

All of today’s trade union leaders were around during the oil “boom” of the 1970s, the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s and the humiliating conditionalities imposed on this country in 1988.

Today, even as Trinidad and Tobago’s energy and energy-based sectors earn massive profits, the nation’s non energy sector, which employs a far greater number of workers than the energy and energy-based sectors is in a grim battle for survival. It knows it must increase productivity and maintain that increase appreciably above wages, salaries and other expenses otherwise cheaply produced goods and services by China and India, aided and abetted by the World Trade Organisa-tion’s (WTO) free trade monster, will crush this country’s and Caricom’s non energy and non energy-based industries.

Meanwhile, although the WTO has allowed Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of Caricom the application of special tariffs on externally (that is to the Region) produced goods, Chinese products, because of their low cost, are already storming the ramparts of our tariff walls. When these battlements should collapse not only the sheer weight of a WTO encouraged thrust, but because any fall off in productivity would have rendered our goods and services uncompetitive.

Then, with public debt rising and dwindling hope for the full discharge of private sector debt, save for those companies which would have, with resolution, stood up for the philosophy of Governor Williams, we would have to return cap in hand to the Paris Club of creditors. And in a repeat of history, the Paris Club would again refer us to the International Monetary Fund. Again, in history’s repeat Trinidad and Tobago would have to apply to the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), better known as the World Bank, for a Structural Adjustment Loan

Perhaps it would be better to remind the leaders of trade unions representing public sector workers, who have been publicly critical of the Central Bank Governor’s advice and some of whom have as declared policy, the argument that not a man must go, what the then president of the IBRD had noted in his Report and Recommendation to the IBRD’s Executive Directors.

He was commenting on the proposal for the Structural Adjustment Loan in his Report dated November 21, 1989. The public sector, the IBRD president warned, “is characterised by substantial over employment....operating inefficiencies....and overall limited institutional capabilities” He referred to the ten per cent cut in public sector salaries (and wages) and the “adoption of an employment reduction programme.”

“The Government recognises that the inward looking trade policies that served in the 1970s when the country did not face an effective external constraint to its development have proven inappropriate in the economic environment of the 1980s,” the World Bank president had stated.

His comments are even more applicable today, particularly as Trinidad and Tobago faces “an external constraint to its development” in the form of free trade and will be confronted by an around the corner unhindered onslaught of low cost imports. I will have to return to this issue next week.