Trade unions must get with the programme

THE EDITOR: It was a beautiful Summer's day and I was sitting on the grass at Streatham Common attending a Jamaican-hosted Back to Africa Movement party.

My Benin University friend on a television course at London University asked "Why do you people want to go back when we sold you into slavery?"

I must now ask the TT trade union movement, why encourage your mainly poor and Afro Trinbagonian workers lame excuses to avoid taking the covid19 vaccine? Why the attempt at mind slavery? It is an obscenity that we have access to vaccines that will give us the power to achieve herd immunity and stay alive in a pandemic yet people are advising against taking it.

The unvaccinated have been proven as the most vulnerable to infection. The hospital beds in both First and Third World countries are now mainly filling up with the unvaccinated. The variants are wreaking havoc.

I wonder if this attempt to stymie TT employers who demand vaccination of all staff is not really just an excuse to shore up dwindling union dues?

Join a trade union and they will defend your right to continued employment even if you remain unvaccinated? Any meetings between the trade unions and the various business chambers could run into weeks. How many citizens must die before circular arguments are completed?

It is predicted by UWI lecturer Rosemarie Belle-Antoine that employers' rights to secure lives and the economy will win in the Industrial Labour Courts.

Can we consult the International Labor Organization as to whether local trade unions are being unreasonable and self-serving? Have these unions veered unreasonably from what is expected of labour?

The health of TT must come first. The economy will definitely die if too may people contract covid19. What is there to be discussed other than how long it will take for the country to succumb to union-generated blind ignorance?

Are the citizens being offered to an an enemy slave trader named covid19? There will be no emancipation expected then, for we will all be dead.

LYNETTE JOSEPH

Diego Martin