Veteran politician and Pan-Africanist Trevor Prescod accused trade unions of abandoning their militant roots, charging that today’s leaders have become too timid and detached from the struggles of the working class.
The outspoken Member of Parliament for
St Michael East suggested the labour movement has strayed far from its roots, which were built on protest, mobilisation and the upliftment of working-class people across Barbados and the wider Caribbean.
Prescod reflected on the early days of trade unionism, when many leaders emerged directly from the working class and were unapologetically focused on wages, working conditions and dignity for labourers. He recalled growing up in an era when protests were common at home and across the region and widely accepted as a necessary driver of social change.
Today, the government backbencher suggested, unions appear far more cautious.
“There’s a trade union now that believes that most of these things are wildcat strikes and things of that nature,” he said.
Prescod was speaking during the question-and-answer session at the 39th Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, held recently at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill. Professor Hakim Adi delivered the lecture on “The zenith of the Pan-African Movement? Revisiting the 1945 Manchester Congress”.
Questioning whether early labour leaders would even recognise the movement today, Prescod said the pioneers of the 1940s expected far more than polite negotiations.
“I don’t believe the [Kwame] Nkrumah, Chris Braithwaite or any of those persons in the 1940s or in the early workers’ movement expected that all that a trade union would be doing would be claiming to be negotiating around the table,” he said, pointing to what he described as their radical and revolutionary approach.
He argued that issues once central to union advocacy have slipped down the agenda.
“From all that I’m seeing today, we’re not hearing anything much about better working conditions, increments for workers and the education programmes of the workers. There’s a major decline in the quality of the value judgments of the people who run the trade union movement,” Prescod said.
He also lamented the absence of leaders comparable to the Caribbean labour giants of the past.
“There’s no Critchlows from Guyana, there’s no Frank Walcott from Barbados and even… Cypriani and Bustamante and all those in the trade union movement in those early days,” he said, citing the pioneer leaders of the movement in the British West Indies in the first half of the 20th Century: Hubert Critchlow who in 1917 formed the British Guiana Labour Union – the Caribbean’s first trade union, Captain Arthur A. Cipriani in Trinidad and Tobago, and Jamaica’s Alexander Bustamante. National Hero Frank Walcott, the longest-serving general secretary of the Barbados Workers Union from 1944 to 1992, led the union through some of Barbados’ most contentious labour battles as the country shifted from an agrarian economy to light manufacturing and services.
But today’s movement is increasingly led by individuals with strong academic credentials but who seem to have little appetite for confrontation or mass mobilisation, Prescod charged.
“You’re seeing people emerging in the trade union movement with a university background, academic background, [but] no fighters fighting on the behalf of the masses of people,” he declared.
He questioned what he described as a drift away from the movement’s original mission, particularly its growing reliance on affiliated credit unions’ housing programmes.
“What do we believe is responsible for the diversion of the trajectory that would have been formed in the 1940s that would cause us to be at this stage now, where the workers’ trade union movement [is] trying to rest their survival on credit union housing programmes that are failing all across the region?” Prescod asked.
“Nobody is saying ‘there must be a major march across the country in protest of certain things that are happening to the workers’. That is a thing of the past.” (WILLCOMM)
The post Prescod accuses unions of losing their fighting spirit appeared first on Barbados Today.
