Holding the paymaster accountable

On February 26, David Forbes, head of the TT Postal Workers' Union, marched down Alexandra Street in Port of Spain. He was protesting the Ministry of Finance's failure to release money to settle the wages agreed during negotiations between his union and the Post Office some months previously.

Not an unreasonable issue to march in protest for, don’t you think? An agreement is an agreement.

His union is a dues-paying member of the Joint Trade Union Movement (JTUM), and JTUM officers Ancel Roget and Ozzie Warwick loyally marched with them.

The previous week, SWWTU had issued a threat, or perhaps it was a warning, to the manager of the Port of Port of Spain that the organisation must accede to their demands for payment of the already promised wages and benefits within seven days, "or else."

What the "else" was, the union did not signal, but let’s face it, when a union issues that kind of threat, we are intended to understand it means "strike."

And what do you expect? If you have hundreds of strong longshoremen and stevedores waiting for their expected increase in income agreed upon during negotiations, and the paymaster is the government, what are recognised majority unions to do? Strike?

They can’t. The port is classified as an essential service and a union representing essential service workers and public-service workers can be de-registered.

But seven months have passed since the JTUM marched in unison down Alexandra Street.

School started last week and most of the union's members are parents. Parents put their trust in union officers they pay to bring home the four per cent increase in their paycheques to enable them to buy books and school uniforms.

But strikes are not taking place these days. Have you noticed? Since the covid19 lockdowns.

Businesses are still suffering from that economic disaster. Small businesses just closed, and as I drive around business areas, I have sadly witnessed that more and more have never reopened. Shopping malls look like jaws with gaps where teeth have been pulled.

The business community cannot afford any more lockdowns. There is even a rumour on the street that a couple of strikes would not be a bad economic choice for organisations that are quietly noting a strike means not having to pay wages they cannot afford.

An interpretation of Sections 63 and 69 of the IRA could even block severance pay to illegally striking workers.

Workers on strike are not earning money to buy schoolbooks, either, so students will have to use old texts from last year and not buy new editions of the same text with only marginal changes every year, the con that the Ministry of Education has allowed publishers to profit from.

When I checked with parents trying to find hundreds of dollars per book, they bitterly complained that new "updated" editions are demanded by schools every year, even when teachers admit the updates consist of only a paragraph or two of the language, but the content remains the same. The maths concepts, scientific theories and philosophy of social development don’t change.

I looked at books for secondary-school students: most seemed to be published by Nelson Thomas Ltd in the UK. Parents are told it is cheaper to publish them abroad, and local publishers cannot publish the quantity needed every year. Of course not, if they insist on the "updating con," ignoring the vast amounts of foreign exchange thereby leached out of TT, which would be kept here if textbooks could be passed down from this year’s student to the following year’s.

It's a colossal con perpetrated on parents of schoolchildren that no one does anything about. Why the Education Ministry allows this, I cannot understand. Who benefits? Is someone profiting?

But then I don’t understand why repairs on St George’s College could not be completed over a two-year shutdown, either.

History has many examples of civic unrest that start with protests by ordinary citizens looking for legal ways to effect civic changes against incalcitrant governments and end up with a change of government. There are forms of protest other than strikes that may stop these injustices.

An example of needed change is the inability of the Central Bank and the Auditor General, according to this week’s report, to perform an audit, apparently by any means, that will enable them, preferably working together, to determine whether the financial controls at the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry were suitably designed and implemented to prevent, detect and correct processing errors. The errors could result in and cause misstatements in the public accounts, according to a statement by the assistant Auditor General.

We are talking of over $2 billion, maybe, gone missing. Why would anyone not want that investigation to go ahead?