GLIMPSES OF URIAH BUTLER

With all too many of them, Butler Day, which was celebrated yesterday, was and is just another public holiday — a day to lime and to party.

Yet it was because of Uriah Butler and his unrelenting struggle in labour’s cause that saw the enactment of the Trades Disputes Ordinance of 1938 which, for the first time, would give the then colony’s trade union movement the legitimate right to pursue the settlement of trade disputes. The following year, largely because of the earlier 1930s struggles of Butler, workers won the right to peaceful picketing. Oil workers in 1937, despite the immense profits of the oil companies, most of them British owned, were being paid starvation wages — eight cents an hour — and workers in the sugar industry were receiving 30 to 35 cents a day, less than what sugar workers were being paid 100 years earlier, shortly after slavery was abolished, and indentured labourers were brought in from India, Madeira and China.

The acting Colonial Secretary, Howard Nankiwell, in a plea for better wages and housing conditions for oil workers, would say in the Legislative Council, the month following on the June 19, 1937 Social Revolution led by Butler, that “Government is collecting large revenues and the oil companies are paying big dividends. Even sugar is now to a considerable extent more than paying its way. There can be no question today,” Nankiwell declared, “of these three employing groups, Government, the oil industry, and the sugar industry being able to pay a fair wage and to provide decent conditions for its labour.” The oil companies would strike back at Nankiwell and their principals in the United Kingdom succeeded in having him recalled.

Butler, together with Krishna Deonarine, who later had his name changed by deed poll to Adrian Cola Rienzi, had been a member of Cipriani’s Trinidad Labour Party. He broke with Cipriani after Cipriani, in early 1935, blocked a hunger march led by Butler, organised to pressure the oil companies to pay better wages and provide better conditions. Because of this betrayal of the workers, after all Cipriani was head of the Labour Party, the oil companies, appreciating that the industrial action had been thwarted, gave the workers a mere two percent increase, way below what the Wages Advisory Board had recommended more than a year earlier.

Butler hammered home at arousing the social consciousness of the oil workers, pressing the need for far better wages than they received. And when the workers took strike action and Butler had been advised of it, he left his home early on the morning of June 19, 1937 for Fyzabad. It was there while Butler was addressing the strikers that a white senior Police officer instructed a Lance Corporal to arrest Butler. “Mr Butler, I know that you will come quietly,” the white officer remarked sarcastically. Butler demanded that the warrant be read to him, as was his right, and as this was being done, he cried out to the angered striking workers: “Must they arrest me?” The gathering storm of strikers shouted: “No!” and moved to form a human shield around Butler. A Police non commissioned officer, Corporal Charlie King, who was neither stationed in Fyzabad, nor on duty at the time, held on to Butler to arrest him. What transpired later was unfortunate.

That evening, some of the rank and file of the Constabulary went looking for Butler, and an individual, called La Brea Charles, who bore a strong resemblance to Butler was shot and killed. Butler went into hiding, but later, cleared of charges, he continued the fight for the workers. Meanwhile, the rioting which had begun in Fyzabad would engulf not only the oil, but the sugar areas as well, forming in the process an alliance of descendants of slaves and indentureds.

However, while Butler was hiding and later in detention, the Oilfields Workers Trade Union, first led by Adrian Cola Rienzi, and registered in 1937, assumed the organising and representing of the oil workers. Butler, who till then, had been content to agitate for the workers’ rights, formed the British Empire Workers, Peasants and Ratepayers Union which challenged the OWTU (re the mobilising of oil workers), and the All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers Trade Union in sugar.

While I do not wish to be dismissive of the gains won by the OWTU, for they have been and continue to be many, nonetheless the foundation laid by Tubal Uriah Butler and his struggles for a better and brighter day for oil and indeed all workers have been major contributory factors to the success of the trade union movement in Trinidad and Tobago.