The changing industrial relations principles

Do you notice how your memory of significant political issues is often linked to events in your own life?

The announcement by Public Utilities Minister Marvin Gonzales last Saturday, that the installation of a new geostationary operational environmental satellite by the TT Meteorological Service would increase the ability to detect Sahara dust movements and prepare for incoming droughts, made me "stand in my shoes and wonder" as our grandmothers used to say. Droughts?

I lived in Cascade when my children were born. The minister mentioned drought. No water? For example, WASA lock off water? Water gone for two weeks at a time? Children still in cloth diapers?

Then I started to wonder about Sahara dust greying the skies. Did it happen back then? Or even 30, 40 or 50 years ago?

I don’t recall that happening. And with a neighbour’s child with asthma, we were responsible for a dust-free house.

During the dry season, we dusted on Tuesdays and Fridays. During the rainy season, it was Friday only.

Now it is necessary as soon as Sahara dust shows up.

But it is not just Sahara dust that is new. A neighbour commenting that her younger sister was in the hospital with cancer, remarked in bewilderment that young people seem to be getting cancer “all the time” now. She didn’t remember in her childhood that happening. She is 56.

I started to think back to what industrial disputes were like 50 years ago.

Minister Gonzales recalled a situation when the country nearly shut down after weather forecasters were unavailable to work. I don’t remember that happening.

But he would know because even back then you could get away with that in the public service. Tolerance was paramount.

Not being "available for work" in the private sector without applying for permission, might result in not having a job available for you to come back to.

We were always available to work, even after playing mas both days, plus J'Ouvert, feet were so swollen you had to wear wachekongs or flip-flops to work on Ash Wednesday. It was a matter of honour.

Nobody actually said so, but in the 70s and 80s, employers took the discipline, production and tolerance motto seriously. Especially the discipline and production part, but then, as now, tolerance prevailed in taking disciplinary action in the public sector.

But in the industrial relations field, practitioners began to research what the courts and tribunals in sister isles were thinking, even before the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) was established and were still heavily influenced by UK jurisprudence.

Some of the principles and practices of good industrial relations however emerged between 1956 when the Federation of the West Indies collapsed (I wept real tears when that happened) and when the CCJ was established in 2021.

Industrial relations practitioners, based on similarities in the common-law fundamentals on which our jurisprudences are based, respected their awards and referenced them in their own local cases. For example, in the Bahamas in 2023, a new male store manager made sexual advances to a female member of the staff in a "store club" similar to the ones that are now being established in TT. She made a written complaint. When she got no response from the general manager, fearing she would lose her job, she retracted her complaint verbally. When a newly hired human resource manager spoke to her about the grievance, she retracted her complaint verbally and on his advice, re-instituted the complaint in writing with more detail against the junior manager.

It appeared that two other employees had previously filed similar complaints in the past but had not been responded to either.

Women’s’ complaints about sexual abuse were often ignored in those days. The junior manager was fired.

The junior manager’s union took the termination to the Industrial Tribunal of the Bahamas pleading the dismissal was wrongful and not in accordance with good industrial relations.

The tribunal ruled that the employer had only to prove that, on the basis of the facts known to him at the time of the dismissal, he had a reasonable belief the young man had committed the misconduct of sexual harassment as outlined in the store’s handbook of "gross indecency and gross misconduct", and that the company had acted reasonably on the "balance of probabilities."

Later that year, another judgment from that tribunal, this one quoting Lord Denning, the master of the roles in Aldair Ltd V Taylor (1978), Lord Denning ICR pgs 445- 451, the UK Courts said, "The dismissal must be upon reasonable grounds, based upon the facts known to the employer at the time of the dismissal which would create a reasonable belief in the employer’s mind that the employee was….guilty of the breach as alleged. It is not necessary for the employer to prove that the offence was committed but that they had reasonable grounds to believe that it had been committed."

This statement by Lord Denning has been accepted ever since in courts and industrial tribunals, particularly those dealing with sexual harassment cases.