NO TRADE union representative who understands what it means to offer responsible leadership should ever condone the gross indiscipline and irresponsible behaviour that took place at the Frome and Monymusk sugar estates over the past few days.
Clearly, this latest eruption has been fuelled by long-standing conflicts between workers and management. But, however legitimate the employees' concerns may be in their dispute with the management of the company, this idea that employees have a right to storm offices threatening bodily harm and blocking gates to others having legitimate business on the properties cannot be excused and must be roundly condemned. Even if workers believe management has failed to respond adequately to their concerns, the physical attacks upon persons and property are indicative of irrational and irresponsible conduct. Indeed, these actions amount to criminal conduct and must be dealt with as such.
Jamaica has developed a fairly sophisticated arbitration machinery for settling labour/management disputes. While intimidation and physical threats have long been stock-in-trade features of wage negotiations and industrial relations disputes, it is one which our union leaders would be well advised to encourage their representatives to abandon. The seeds of indiscipline sown today will reap a bitter harvest tomorrow.
The genesis of the present dispute remains to be clarified, a position stated by Minister of Agriculture Roger Clarke himself, who may well need greater support from union leaders who supposedly should be better equipped to thread through the thorny thickets of industrial relations. But apart from seemingly puny appeals to persuade the workers to end their wildcat strike, the union leaders appeared to have surrendered or lost control.
No company can or should surrender the intrinsic function of management to run the enterprise and cede control to the workforce. That is a given in normal industrial relations which provide avenues of conciliation or arbitration when disputes develop. What has transpired at Frome is an aberration of normal practice and must not be condoned.
We had better realise that the world does not owe us a living, and the nonsense that is driving this undisciplined behaviour must stop. The workers must be made to understand that their own interests are being undermined even as the industry is in danger of not meeting its international quotas.
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