Editorial | Trade unions need new thinking

More than six years ago, in 2013, at the 75th anniversary of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), this newspaper noted that the observance seemed to have been passing “largely like a damp squib”.

Kavan Gayle, the BITU president, we noted, would have forgiven anyone “who presumed that not even the union’s leadership is enthusiastic about the anniversary. We don’t feel their excitement”. It probably says something that we don’t recall anything more than, perhaps, a perfunctory marking of the 80th. Maybe they couldn’t be bothered.

We were reminded of the BITU’s event by Helene Davis Whyte’s hunch-shouldered lament, reported by this newspaper on Sunday, of attracting young people to the trade union movement, and the suggestion by her colleague, Rhonda Pryce, that trade unionism, and its benefits, should be on the curriculum of Jamaican schools.

We have no opposition to Ms Pryce’s idea, but the tenor of the remarks suggests, we have observed many times over the last decade, a trade union movement in crisis, without a vision of how to refashion itself for relevance in the labour market in the 21st century and a domestic economy increasingly intertwined with the global market.

Mrs Davis Whyte is president of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU), an umbrella body of labour organisations, of which, we estimate, hardly more than 20 per cent of Jamaica’s approximately 1.34 million employed workers are members. And more than 40 per cent of the unionised labour force is employed to the Government, including members of the security forces, health-sector workers, and teachers. In other words, private employees, including the mostly young workers in the growing business process outsourcing sector, are mostly outside the trade unions.

“Part of the difficulty … is that the trade union is really a communal organisation, and you find that a lot of young people are more individualistic,” said Mrs Davis Whyte. “… In that context, you have to be able to tell them what is the benefit of the community.” So?

The fundamental issue, as we understand it, is the need for the trade union movement to frame a message and offer a service relevant to the times, which includes a rapidly changing and globalised labour market, offering a service that the new, and emerging, Jamaican worker believes he/she needs and the basis upon which that service will be obtained or contracted. In fashioning this new approach to worker representation, trade unions have to take into account the real tensions, and contradictions, that exist in Jamaica’s labour market.

There is no gainsaying the major role the trade union movement played in Jamaica’s modern political and social development, especially since the 1938 riots. Indeed, as Ms Pryce, of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCA) said, young workers may not appreciate the effort’s of trade unions in gaining many of the labour-relations rights, enshrined in legislation, now enjoyed by Jamaicans.

SHORTCOMINGS

Many of these laws remain important, but they were mostly framed before digital technology placed a sizeable chunk of Jamaica’s workforce in the centre of an increasingly competitive, and globalised, market where jobs are fungible and often unconstrained by national borders. The labour market is forced to respond to this reality.

But even with the emergence of this new worker among Jamaican employees, there are other factors in the labour market that exacerbate the tensions in the workforce. Indeed, it is estimated that seven of 10 Jamaican workers are without training for the jobs they do, and no more than 20 per cent of students do well enough in high school to, after grade 11, immediately matriculate to university. Additionally, as many as 80 per cent of university graduates emigrate, taking their education and skills with them.

When these shortcomings are added to historic weak government policy and underinvestment in research and development, there is little wonder that labour productivity has declined by an annual average of nearly half a percentage point for the best part of four decades and that real wages have also fallen. It is obvious why the island’s economy has been stagnant.

It is in this context that Mrs Davis Whyte has to frame her message of the relevance of trade unions – about helping to remove the constraints to growth and to provide efficient, affordable services to workers, who may not necessarily want to be permanent members of a labour group.