Martin Henry

Yesterday was another Labour Day. Precious little work was put into this Labour Day. Labour Day has become more of a rest day from people's regular and toilsome labours of getting on in life or just holding ground in a harsh economic climate. And coming this year smack in the middle of the week, it is likely to be the beginning of a long weekend during which matters of national productivity will have to chill out. Jamaica is a record-breaking place for productivity declines over the last 30 years or so.

I well remember the 'put work into Labour Day' Labour Days of the 1970s with Michael Manley himself at the helm. As a youngster I joined what seemed to be the entire Jamaican population in putting serious work into Labour Day. Michael, the charismatic, had managed to get the people to forget their hardships and their divisions and to work with him on improving their communities and helping the less fortunate in a hard scrabble Jamaica.

Manley had moved Labour Day away from the concept of commemorating the trade union struggles, struggles in which he himself had been deeply involved as officer and then the second president of the National Workers' Union which his father had founded out of the unrests of 1938. Labour Day in Michael Manley's democratic socialist Jamaica came to be Citizens' Patriotism, Equality, Fraternity and Community Service Day. And people bought the vision wholesale.

Was not the first

But this wasn't the first mass social awakening. Daddy Manley, with money from the big banana companies led by United Fruit, had created Jamaica Welfare as a nationalist agency of social change and renewal at community level, a generation before Sonny Boy launched his social revolution. The Pioneer Clubs of Jamaica Welfare sang in communities all over Jamaica, to the tune of "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah", "We're out to build a new Jamaica, with Christ our Pioneer".

In both instances idealism gave way to disillusionment. The dirty politics of the country has had a big hand in this. Tribalism is not an invention of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. The trade unions used to battle each other in the streets, not too much unlike today's gangs, and many a Labour Day parade of competing unions turned into nasty squabbles. Criminal charges were brought against Alexander Bustamante from one of those incidents producing a fatality.

The genetic linkage of political parties and trade unions, which continues to this day, must also bear its fair share of blame for Jamaica to achieve the level of development dreamt of. The political need to 'protect' labour has hindered necessary radical overhauls of the Jamaican economy at critical junctures, with action being generally too little too late.

'Social death'

This year's Labour Day, no longer devoted to commemorating the struggles of labour or able to excite nationalist patriotic passion among weary citizens, rested under the theme, 'Honouring our Ancestors, Strengthening our Communities' and the national project was the resuscitation of the Bath Botanical Gardens. For much of our history, most of our ancestors were not accorded the most basic of human rights, the right of self ownership, much more any right to control their labour. Slavery was 'social death' as Orlando Patterson puts it.

There has been the most amazing decay of communities since Manley's first Labour Day in 1972, at the level of infrastructure in many cases and at the level of social life in many more cases. The various inner-city 'towns', now burnt-out shells and a social wasteland with neo-slavery to badmanism, being the most poignant examples. A certain reading of Orlando Patterson's The Sociology of Slavery pulls up a spectacular parallel between modern don and old slave driver. Political tribalism is the principal cause of this decay of community, national and local, and of the movement south of development.

The Bath Botanical Gardens, in its own decrepit condition from neglect, is a metaphor of the national decay of communities and of the stupid and hypocritical approach of letting things fall apart and then big-fixing them. With Labour Day itself in a state of advanced decay, the Gardens was an apt choice of a national project.