Feigning doom and gloom in energy sector

THE EDITOR: The break-up of the TT energy sector can be traced, from a public perspective, to the point in time coinciding with the Mittal group blaming the labour movement for all its woes. The coverage of it suggested that TT's labour movement was a permanent economic and social pariah and an international disgrace. But in fact the labour movement in TT is highly skilled and motivated and has had an excellent history of service to local industry.

What escaped Mittal and those who supported the company is that labour's share in the common good is precisely guaranteed in the Constitution. Labour has always strived to deal with this in good faith and has never become militantly socialist and politically over-involved – as for example happened in the UK.

What has unfolded in TT since then is a persistent reallocation of energy resources and profits into private capitalist hands with a distinctive surrender to a foreign dominance.

In retrospect, the labour movement is not the cause of all of this, clearly. The labour movement was used in a false alarm to deflect attention from what was to come. And by all appearances it is not labour that is being disenfranchised, it is the nation as a whole that is being undone.

More and more it is showing that this is no accident. It is a deliberate, unscrupulous unfolding give-away to capitalism. At any rate, it proves, in effect, that the nation's energy resources remain, after all, extremely viable, contrary to the doom-and-gloom moaning and dry-well misgivings.

When the Nicolas Maduro regime repatriated resources, the multinationals involved took Venezuela to the cleaners through the International Court of Arbitration, and Venezuela strangely submitted.

If such clauses exist in TT Government contracts with multinationals and other private entities, then TT should know that when it repatriates what belongs to TT, she can repudiate those clauses as well and take up business elsewhere.

E GALY

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