War changes everything

Diana Mahabir-Wyatt

It is impossible to ignore the effects of war on finance and the economy in Trinidad and Tobago, now that we are post-budget and amid two major international wars: the one in the Middle East, ancestral geographic home of many in TT, and the Middle European one, source of wheat products necessary to many TT businesses.

I became aware this past week that, from an industrial-relations perspective, wise stakeholders – both employers and trade unions – are drawing up contingency plans for the near future. Just in case.

War changes everything. Even with no direct involvement by our military, there will be effects on procurement for every business, owing to the high levels of imports we live with, partners with whom we trade or have financial transactions, anything involving the transport of goods, and the people we bring in as consultants or advisers.

I have lost track of the times TT has called on Israel for technical advice on agriculture, digitalisation, town planning and medical technology.

But that was before. This is now.

Change comes in on little cat feet, silently, to quote Carl Sandburg, while we are not looking, like the proverbial frogs in the pot of water on a stove.

During war, oil prices tend to go up (one of the unstated reasons for war). That hits TT businesses both ways, as we now face a higher import price in order to produce, as well as when we sell products.

In one way or another, as a country with international trade links and oil, we will feel it.

Last week, going over historical documents reflecting on the effects on TT businesses during the world wars, I noticed a statistical connection.

During and after the last world war some thousand European Jewish families fled as refugees to Jamaica and TT. Israel and Palestine didn’t exist then. At the same time, people of the Islamic faith from the war-torn Middle East area fled to the Caribbean, where they could (and still do) live in peace.

If the current wars affecting our lives continue, as all the combatants vow they will, history shows us that people will change, systems change, and in all countries industrial relationships and the laws that control industrial relations will inevitably change.

The internationalisation of trade on which our economy as well as recent procurement legislation has been based will almost certainly be affected because of the blockage of transport venues. The procurement of goods and services faced by TT during both major periods of crisis is well known.

There is no real reason to suppose that similar blockages will not begin to affect commercial and manufacturing, hospitality and medical businesses as the months go by here. Which means that everyone employed will be affected.

Employees' expectations are high and rise with each announcement of someone else’s wage increase.

Under the guise of protection of the population, as fear is cultivated and job losses threaten, history tells us that government ruled by decree tends to follow, step by step, to control protest marches and dissent, until control of people’s working lives is complete. And accepted.

Negotiations are superseded by fiat. Records are kept. Fifteen years ago, analysts spoke of the wisdom of TT moving to non-renewable sources of energy; and very few perceptive organisations moved in that direction. Major oil companies drew up plans to diversify. Even bp’s logo changed to indicate its future direction, and the majors moved to sell their holdings to governments like ours. They moved to change their technologies and their educational systems.

That kind of change requires generations to prepare for.

We stuck with our belief in oil and gas, which served us well, focusing on what worked in the past.

Not the future. Now is the future we decided on then. Only the pandemic forced digitalisation into our schools without preparing teachers to learn how to teach using the new technology. Nor did we invest in installing free national access to broadband technology to enable an easy transition to digitalisation.

War anywhere can bring restrictions on travel to everywhere. And tight economics. During World War I, prices escalated; oilfield workers struck in Fyzabad, Point Fortin and at Lake Asphalt for higher wages. For the decade after that war ended. there were successive strikes, but as the UWI principal tried to point out to striking teachers last week, the employers then could not raise wages, as their hands were tied, as hers are now.

Back then employers were forbidden by the Legislative Council to increase wages. Now the Finance Ministry controls what UWI can pay, and what can be offered to the 37,000 public servants we support.

Back then they called in the British army to control the situation, and – as students should be learning in their history lessons here, but aren’t – what followed was a slew of strikes, violence and destruction of property in protest. There is only so much control people will swallow.

The then government passed a law called the Habitual Idlers Ordinance that allowed police to pick up unemployed people and put them in a kind of labour camp at the River Estate settlement and farmed the “idlers” out to employers looking for workers. Even the Foreign Office in the UK couldn’t sanction the camps, where people were not allowed to sing or whistle or get together and talk to each other.

The UK repealed the ordinance. But what followed was inevitable.

Over the next few years there were strikes by dockworkers, stevedores, scavengers, WASA, sugar estates, Trinidad Rice Mills, coconut dealers, the Match Factory, Alstons & Co, the electricity company, the phone company – and over they went like ninepins.

Prices in shops went up between 150 per cent and 345 per cent and the wage control by the Legislative Council had continued. Minimum wages were mandatory and not enough to feed a family. Some private employers (not many) raised wages anyway, which was against the law, and were sanctioned.

Eventually, the Trinidad Workingmen's Association (there were no trade unions back then, but the TWA was incredibly strong) intervened and got a 33 per cent increase, but only for the asphalt dockers and stevedores.

By 1920 there was a virtual general strike and the Colonial Office in the UK sent down a regiment of soldiers to put a stop to it. And they had guns.

That was the beginning that led to the industrial relations system. This grew until the 1930s (we will deal with this next week), but notice that up till then, TT was still a colony, and not very happy about it.

Perspicacious readers will have noticed that wage decisions were not made by either employees or employers back then. They were made by what people referred to as the “Col Sec,” the Colonial Secretariat in the UK, which passed orders down to the “Leg Co,” the Legislative Council, an administrative body made up of chosen TT members– not democratically elected, but "chosen" by the Governor General – who was the equivalent of the chair of our Cabinet in terms of decision-making power.

Stay tuned till next week.