Our toxic industrial relations climate
The trajectory of the industrial relations dispute between government and the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) now appears imprisoned in a familiar pattern of uncertainty and suspicion (some may even say bad faith) with each side striving to avoid being outflanked, this, as the increasingly coarse texture of the engagement appears to push the issue further away from an amicable resolution. What continues to unfold in this instance is a microcosm of what, for years, has passed for industrial relations, more specifically for relations between employer and employee in Guyana. There is, these days, an inevitability to negotiations between employer and employee becoming imprisoned in unhelpful quagmires arising out of an instinctive insecurity and a lack of trust, circumstances that render arrival at amicable settlement elusive, prolong disputes and in the final analysis validate a counterproductive template that now becomes the norm. We are, these days, reaping what we have sown over many years of ‘playing politics’ with industrial relations.
Guyana has, for decades, existed in an environment that boasts a reduced and to a large extent compromised labour movement, largely the result of an overly assertive state machinery which, in terms of the balance of power between the employer and the employee, has been relentlessly on the ascendancy. Its modus operandi has been to make concessions only when those promise rewards attended by some political gain; and the unions, the vast majority of them, largely as a consequence of their own limitations, are these days, playing with decidedly weaker hands and feebler negotiating positions.
Having edged their way - just over a week ago - to an understanding that brought an almost two-week teachers’ strike to an end and saw a return to the negotiating table, Government and the GTU are at daggers drawn again, this time, over who will chair the panel of Arbitrators assigned to bring an end to dispute. It is at this juncture that the familiarity of the pattern into which our industrial relations ‘culture’ has settled comes back, as it repeatedly does, to haunt us. The absence of trust that supplants well-intentioned negotiations with an unashamed jockeying for positions of advantage has, in this instance, surfaced with a vengeance, the prevailing disposition deriving from what the GTU feels is the generous helping of bad faith that it has been ‘served’ along the way. Accordingly, having arrived at this juncture by demonstrating its ability, so far, to ‘manage’ the dispute (both the discourses with government and the strike) with a not unimpressive measure of competence, the GTU is mindful not to let slip the ‘gains’ that it has secured so far.
The ‘stand down’ from the strike by the GTU, one feels, was calculated, the Union recognizing the enormous difficulty associated with sustaining industrial action for a protracted period but at the same time wanting to ‘get something back’ for the teachers for their effort. Put differently, it cannot afford to ‘fluff’ the arbitration exercise.
In this regard its primary challenge reposes in the reality that it is dealing with a state machinery which, in matters of industrial relations, is simply not accustomed to either ‘rolling over’ or emerging second best. Even if it may have occurred under a different political dispensation, the 56-day 1999 strike by public servants led by the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) and the award by the Armstrong Arbitration Tribunal to the public servants of 31.06% for 1999 and 26.66% for 2000 was by far the heaviest industrial relations bloody nose turnaround that the state has experienced in modern times.
It is against this backdrop that the roadblock in the present arbitration process has to be seen. The impasse over who chairs the arbitration proceedings is symptomatic of the crippling paranoia that afflicts both sides. In the instance of the state it is a fear of leaving a door open that might require it to make compromises that it does not feel it can afford. In the instance of the Union it is a concern (perhaps more than a concern) that to concede the chairmanship of the arbitration panel to government would, in effect, be to run the risk of surrendering the proverbial ‘corn and husk.’
Government would want, one feels, an arbitration panel chaired by a personage who, hypothetically, at least, can be relied upon to protect its interests; in the instance of the Union, a deep concern is bound to prevail over the likelihood of coming out of the process ‘second best’ in circumstances where key decisions are left to an Arbitrator of the government’s choosing.
What we really need to be aiming at is a process that can jettison the fears and the bogeys which (as was mentioned earlier) have long taken a firm grip on the industrial relations process in Guyana, giving rise to forms of behaviour that persist in making a complete mockery of conventional employer/employee relations. The pattern of events in the present industrial relations dispute points to the fact that we are still nowhere near the end of that search.