What's wrong with contract labour

Ahead of Wednesday's Labour Day celebrations, a man reading his paper out loud in a St Ann's maxi last week said, "Labour Day is coming up, so the union has to make a fuss about something."

He was reading an article headlined: OWTU warns of impending 'catastrophe' at Yara plant due to contract worker usage, quoting union president Ancel Roget, in what is being seen as a not very subtle threat.

I do not know why Yara has been using contract labour. Yara is a multinational company. If I recall correctly, it has plants in over 20 countries, including two in Trinidad and Tobago.

Multinationals don't scare easily, but a threat is a threat, and you never can tell.

Remember when Arcelor Mittal thought the threat of a strike, even a legal one, backed up by the Industrial Court, would get their demands met?

It was a strategy that had always worked before in TT. And what happened? Arcelor Mittal, a family-owned conglomerate, which is one of the largest and most powerful in the world, faced with wage demands that were beyond those in its other companies world-wide, simply packed up and left TT. It was their company. It was their right to do so.

Thousands of workers both employees and ring-fenced lost everything, even severance pay, because severance is not payable when a company closes down completely, as there is nothing coming in, we are told, to pay them with. And no one is certain about the pension contributions.

We are also told, although the case is still before the court – the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council no less – that the same or a similar fate is facing retired employees of the old BWIA, whose pension fund, according to a news report last week, was shrinking even as the numbers of retirees were shrinking,

The last time I heard a union using a ploy against a company because it was using contract workers, it had to do with an ingenious scam.

The registered collective agreement (RCA) had the usual overtime clause that promised time-and-a-half for four hours overtime, double time in wages for time worked after that and triple time for time worked on a public holiday. So how the men worked it was in pairs.

On a weekend before a public holiday, the engineer on the incoming shift would not show up, so the engineer on the outgoing shift would have to stay.

He would stay for the whole shift and get two-and-a-half times normal pay, and if that day was a public holiday, he would earn six times his normal wage.

Then the next time a public holiday came around, the other man would not show up, and he would get six times his normal pay.

All perfectly legal, according to the contract. As public holidays don't come every month, although sometimes they do, the scam worked very lucratively for a while.

But managers are not as stupid as workers sometimes think they are.

Someone in accounts eventually caught on, and the industrial relations manager advised the supervisor on shift to call a contractor in on any Friday night before a public holiday when a chief engineer did not turn up for a shift to replace an outgoing shift.

Most major companies have contractors on standby just in case of an emergency. Also worth noting is that most major companies ensure the companies that they contract as stand-bys already have technical staff trained to the international standard required.

That is how they get to be contracted by international companies. If need be, they can even have expertise flown in a couple hours' notice. It is considerably less expensive than losing a contract for not meeting a deadline.

In one instance, I was actually involved in, it was the union itself that set up the contracting company, got the contract for overtime filling in work, and everybody apparently lived happily after. Very entrepreneurial, that union.

Now, if you read last week's column, you will remember that OWTU is currently the recognised majority union for more than one essential service, and the IRA prohibits essential services from going on strike, as they are essential to the country's economic survival; especially at a time when the Prime Minister keeps telling us we are in grave financial straits, so even he might not overlook OWTU workers being influenced by threats of potential industrial action by the “perceived possibility “of accidents accelerating unless Yara cancels the contracts of currently out-of-work men earning a few dollars to feed their families.

It didn't sound very comradely to the men in the St Ann's maxi last week.

Then came that heart-rending advertisement on pages 24-26 of last weekend’s Newsday, listing 17 union contracts never implemented, some for as long as ten years and counting.

Also on that list is a demand from the SWWTU for, and I quote: “A call for the Parliament to immediately revisit and fix the Arcelor Mittal debacle, ensuring that the affected workers are compensated for their years of service.”

This was the case referred to earlier. Such problems never disappear by themselves.