Time to revive labour advocacy
IAM trying to understand why teachers would object to offering three more days of instruction as mandated by the Ministry of Education in light of the industrial disruption that occurred some weeks ago.
It is the state of mind behind the objection that should concern us. For there can be no doubt that considerable time of an already-inadequate school experience was occasioned by what was, in reality, an act of justified civil disobedience as workers sought (and haplessly are still seeking) to negotiate a better wage deal.
So to cavil about teaching for three extra days in an attempt to make up for lost time can only prejudice students and betrays a work-to-rule attitude that is beneath the profession’s pedigree, and that teaches powerful negative lessons from which nothing named progress or prosperity can emerge.
After all, labour should lead development. This is so because working people make up the majority of the population, and being closest in class terms to the most vulnerable in any society, ought to be most caring of their interests.
Now, I recognise immediately how naive this proposition will seem to many and how improbable it will appear in Jamaica’s existing social order and political economy. It would have been much less so two generations ago, and the loss is our peril.
It is the activism of organised labour that propelled our national movement leading to political Independence, the expansion and entrenchment of human rights, and the broadening of prospects for human advancement. That struggle demanded commitment, sacrifice and a willingness to use hard-won influence and power, not for selfishness and complacency, but for enablement and cooperation.
Just study the rise of unionism in our 20th-century history, the friendly societies, the burial schemes, credit unions, tax and rate-payer and ‘pardner’ guilds, not to mention church associations, all organised to get around the structured discrimination of class and race.
Where are they and their successors in title and function now?
UNIONS ARE REACTIVE
Trade unions are generally reactive rather than pioneering in relations with government, have very little influence on legislation, are out-argued at EPOC and the Growth Council, and have come to put up with the rape of workers’ rights by the near-universal system of contractual employment without benefits.
Listen to their silence on the amendments to the Banking Services Act, their weakness in relation to the misplaced priorities of financial institutions that hold their (the workers’) money; the mish-mash of publicsector and pension reforms, the minimum wage, or health and educational inequality.
When popular democracy recedes, oligarchs and tyrants prevail. Bitterness, cynicism and self-absorption replace struggle and optimism among the people.
This piece, then, is meant as encouragement for the revival of labour advocacy. The strong union representation on the Housing Trust board must insist that workers’ contributions be used to build dwellings that minimum wage workers can afford and to enhance existing investments in the inner cities and squatter communities, rather than building up massive reserves too easily siphoned for other purposes.
The Jamaica Teachers’ Association can be the explicit, not follow-line, leaders of equitable and truly transformed education. The same applies to the health and security sectors. The Jamaica Agricultural Society, of which I am a member, must take itself out of Government’s pocket and be free to inspire radical land reform, production technology and effective marketing.
If this is done, there would be much more of a balance between capital and labour in the wholesome development of a nation that works for all and not just for the few.