Nearly all trade union leaders have been in power almost everlastingly
Dear Editor,
Last May Day one witnessed what pretended to be a celebration of democracy, to some however, with just a nuance of hypocrisy.
It was noticeable that almost all the proclaimed trade union leaders have been in power almost everlastingly in their respective unions. So when they shouted for the trade union movement to remain steadfast and more closely integrated, their appeal was implicitly for their personal leadership to remain intact for a further indefinite period.
They gave little indication that they care for workers like themselves protesting during recent months about the travesty being played out publicly in the Guyana Public Service Union. Not an iota of concern was shown for the complaints by this union’s members about the mismanagement generally, and the manipulation which had become endemic in the leadership, more specifically in the instant elections process, which in any case was alleged to be a repetition of previous experience.
A careful observer of these players and their playoffs is forced to wonder, whether and why in the interest of the very justice they demand for employees they did not consider it appropriate to investigate (and indeed mitigate) the misbehaviours complained of? Was it reflective of their own attitude to similar internal eruptions? What moral authority can they then claim in addressing their perception of inconsistencies in the behaviour and values of other agencies?
How, for example, could they ignore the palpable conflict of interest implicit in the leader of the GPSU accepting the acting Chairmanship of the Public Service Commission, the employer of the very workers he is committed to represent?
But in a remarkable compatibility of organizational (and indeed constitutional) blindness, the decision-making employer colludes in what some will see as the union leader being haplessly compromised.
But give the decision-makers the benefit of the doubt, and recognise that commonsense is the rarest sense of all.
But then there is the assertion that ‘May Day’ leaders are not the only ones to speak with forked tongues. Yours faithfully, E B John