Is the balance of power shifting?

Back in 1891, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical entitled Rerum Novarum, which began with a statement that might have been made last week.

It said, "That the spirit of revolutionary change which has long been disturbing the nations of the world should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising."

What the goodly Pope included in his concept of practical economics I am not aware, but the encyclical went on to note the expansion of industrial pursuits, scientific advancements and most insightfully the changed relations between employers and employees.

Have you noticed, in the century and a third since he spoke those words, the practicality of what he said?

I am just using those words to catch your attention. Almost any equivalent quotation would do. There is a lot of politics in industrial relations, as mandarins like Reginald Dumas, Frank Barsotti, Rampersad and Scotty Lewis knew when the Industrial Relations Act was drafted.

That is why the faculties of Social and Economic Relations and the Institute of International Relations at UWI became essential.

Understanding that history teaches rulers how patterns of power develop, a clause was inserted into the act stating that a trade union that was recognised in one category of essential industry after the act was passed in 1972 could not be thereafter granted recognition in another such category.

So OWTU, one of the most powerful trade unions in TT, could not consolidate its power by gaining recognition in the iron and steel industry when it was established. If it could have done so, that would have made it even, if not more, powerful than the government itself.

An essential industry is one regarded as essential to the development and sustenance of the national economy.

OWTU was already the recognised majority union (RMU) for electricity and most of the energy industry, both key bricks of economic development and survival. How powerful could you get? Not to be outsmarted in its pursuit of power, OWTU gave birth to an offshoot union, the Iron and Steel Union of TT, created in its image and likeness.

However, as history shows, the assumption of generational power can be dangerous.

Thinking it could be as powerful or perhaps under the direction of OWTU, the Iron and Steel Union, in an attempt to push the Iron and Steel Company – an internationally funded manufacturing organisation financed by the Mittal family – into a wage hike further than it could go, directed the workforce into taking legal strike action that closed down production and sent the unresolved wage dispute to the Industrial Court.

The court sided with the union’s demands and the industry, in response, simply shut down, for good. It left thousands of employees and ring-fenced entrepreneurs jobless and without an income.

Employees were left without severance pay, since if industrial action shuts down a whole company for good, no severance pay is payable (there is no income to pay severance with).

So the company pulled up stakes and left TT for good, re-establishing itself in the UK with a trade union more perceptive, perhaps, about international energy economics and glad to gain 2,000 new members.

Since then, apart from OWTU protests outside the relevant gates over the shutting-down of a large part of the oil and gas industry, we have not experienced many strikes, unless you count the very efficacious KFC strike, which did not involve workers striking for more pay, but customers striking against the increase in fast-food prices. The company backed down. People power won the day.

But we are hearing more threats of strikes, so the power plays go on.

There is a lesson that the Pope foresaw coming: "A revolutionary change in the cognate field of practical economics and in the relations between employers and employees."

In the international and, recently, in the local news, it is not the employees who are losing. The battle is between executives and executives. It is the executives who leave of their own volition or are forced out by their own ethics or by the ethics of those above them.

This is influenced by what the pope called scientific advancements and what economic analysts refer to as AI, or the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages. This is a vocabulary that many people in positions of power do not even understand, much less are confident about making strategic decisions about.

Watching Donald Trump, the modern equivalent of a Machiavellian bastion of power, found guilty of 34 charges in court, not for lying about his relations with Stormy Daniels, but, as in the case of the famous criminals Al Capone and Mickey Cohen, for breaking every tax law he could find to break, has unsettled holders of power everywhere.

The powerbrokers are losing, to the media and the wordsmiths. Interesting, isn’t it?