THE JAMAICA Public Service Company (JPSCo) said at the weekend that electricity supplies have been restored to normal after a series of outages across the island on Friday. Industrial action earlier in the week had raised doubts once more about the effectiveness of the laws that are supposed to safeguard the essential services.
Way back in the 1970s when trade union militancy posed a serious threat to public transport services, in particular, the old Essential Services Law had to be repealed. Its replacement, The Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes (LRID) Act of 1975, is now 27 years old.
The LRID retains conditional prohibitions against strike action in specified essential services. Yet the relevant authorities seem to shy away from invoking the imperatives of the law. The latest example was last week's response to the episodes of industrial action against the JPSCo.
Although the Minister of Labour is empowered to act in accordance with the provisions of the LRID he opted instead for court injunctions. The subsequent defiance of the court by key JPSCo technical staff pretending to be sick is the ultimate expression of industrial relations blackmail. It also represented a potential threat to the national economy along with the inconvenience that irregular power outages posed to households and business across the country.
The sick-out has long been regarded as a fraudulent trade union tactic and is indeed caught in the legal definition of what constitutes industrial action. Indeed there was a notable case in the 1980s when a Tribunal award to Alcan workers of payment for a sick-out was thrown out by the Supreme Court.
It is worth noting that under existing labour legislation trade union leaders remain immune to penalties of any kind.
It is a circumstance Labour Minister Horace Dalley might wish to examine in light of his pledge to modernise the Ministry to meet the challenges of globalisation.
He was responding early last month to trade union concerns about pension reform and occupational safety. The state of the law affecting industrial disputes also warrants urgent review.
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