2006-02-24
Good Evening and Welcome to OWTU Speaks on this Carnival Friday.
What do we ltalk about today when serious talk may forcibly be relegated to last place behind robber talk, the cracking of whips and tweeting of whistles? I agree with the Principal of UWI at St. Augustine that it is difficult to decide which of our multiplicity of important national issues one might choose to treat with on Carnival Friday when there is abundant wining, jamming and frivolity with their attendant and inversely affected application of good sense and mature thinking.
Of all of our no-doubt well informed and articulate newspaper columnists I pay attention to the writings of only a few. Dr. Bhoe Tewarie is one of them. Another lof them is Raffique Shah who very roundly criticized and condemned the maverick nature of the treatment of security for our very important institutions and their personnel. I refer here to the President electing or having it decided for him – to be seated in an already overcrowded North Stand at the Panorama Semis the other day, a week or so ago. Raffique was recommending that our leaders be imbued with a sense of mature discipline and responsibility commensurate with the important offices that they occupy – that is what I understood him to have enunciated in his column last week.
I happen to remember too, a Prime Minister – elect, before he moved up to the Residence in 1991, was self advised that to be regular, meant visiting a particular joint, best friend in tow with embarrassed security detail et al – for his bake and smoke herring. Nothing is really wrong about that except that Prime Ministers must know that once they become Prime Ministers they are different and must behave differently from the rest of our ordinary folk.
Let me expand, briefly on that. It is not acceptable that a Prime Minister visits the rum and smoke herring shop, dressed in old short pants, half buttoned shirt and old rubber slippers of the 120Y model. Neither is it acceptable that he lines up every Saturday Night for Corn Soup outside any discotheque in San Fernando. He establishes a pattern which provides a nightmare for even the best security details. It is foolish. It is good politics only for the puerile.
Leaders who are fooled into believing that these are great gestures at being rootsy and regular just make themselves regular and sometimes despicable fools. We still have not decided what we might concentrated talk about on Carnival Friday.
I should perhaps admonish all to be careful, responsible and safe.
Enjoy the revelry. Jump Up, Wine, Dance, Jam, Prance, Wave, Wail and have a good time but be safe. Happy Carnival!
I am Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU Speaks
2006-02-06
Good Evening! OWTU Speaks feels pleased and privileged to welcome you to today’s commentary.
We address again today, the Occupational Safety and Health Act – OSHA – and insist that the ‘grand give-away’ – now some folks will cuss me for saying ‘sell out’ – we insist that the ‘grand give – away’ of the workers’ interest positions will not be allowed to go away or just rest easy.
These days everything seems so easily purchasable Principles are bought and sold, rights and freedom assaulted and abandoned and even conscience which is supposed to distinguish man from quadruped is relinquished. It was pathetic the way the Natuc peddlers tried to wash themselves of the sin of having yielded in so unprincipled a manner to the anti-worker business sector demands for certain amendments to the Occupational Safety and Health Act before implementation of those Parliament approved and President assented measures which were the result of years of deliberate considerations, dialogue and principled compromise by all the stakeholders.
At their forced media conference on Friday last, the same carpet baggers who boasted a victory with the Prime Minister on Tuesday 16th January, three weeks ago, were denying ownership of and support for the chilled water amendments which fundamentally weakened if not all together removed the few worker protection clauses in the Original Act.
They claimed that the nefarious amendments are not theirs; they had no choice in the matter; the amendments were amendments of the State; they had no choice in the matter; the amendments are a diplomatic excuse by the Government to save face.
Lame excuses by a shameless Natuc top brass – all of them.
And the duncest of them all – the chief salesman comments that the media was misled into giving status to other organizations which cry ‘foul and sellout’. He shouted that there is only one labour federation and the problem lies in the media insisting on the creation of a next labour federation, and that a labour federation is an organisaton that consists of only trade unions.”
Well we should like to have the clown prince of Mr. Manning’s chosen labour federation in the country that a sell-out consciously perpetrated or otherwise, is still a sellout as a trade union donkey is a quadruped dress in any garb. The amendments which the Natuc top brass accepted and agreed as coming from the Prime Minister are the same ones which all sections of the labour movement had rejected as coming from the MOL, Danny Montano.
2006-02-03
Good Evening and Welcome to OWTU Speaks.
I am particularly sorry about denying you our listeners, subscribers and supporters our much-appreciated commentaries on the two earlier occasions – last Monday and Wednesday. Sincere apologies are extended. I flew out to Brussels on Monday evening to participate in a meeting of a recently established Strategy and Organizing Standing Committee whose mandate is to develop and promote an Alliance between the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mines and General Workers Unions of which I am an Executive Member, and International Transport Federation. I arrived back home last night.
Very early this morning one media house asked me what was our next step in the struggle for a proper Occupational Safety and Health Law for the workers of the Country. The reporter had awakened me from deep sleep – my having left the Brussels Hotel early enough for my 7:10 a.m. flight to Heathrow, London and the BWee flighy out jof Heathrow being delayed for two hours and the associated jet lag and all – I was tired but alive enough to emphasize three very important words in the reporter’s enquiry – struggle, proper and law.
The OWTU and all the other conscious and national interest committed Trade Unions would wield significant influence in any struggle for modern conditions of work and industrial advancement, improved productivity and economic growth and development. Struggle is not a bad word if one were not incapacitated by mental constipation and a debilitated sub normal intelligence quotient. For such an afflicted person, sell-out is always the preferred course. Those sections of the business community which opposed workers’ rights and privileges continued to hold their line of struggle against implementation of the original Act 1 of 2004 as passed by both Houses of Parliament and assented to by the President. The anti-worker business community influence over the Government confident that some asinine buffoon in the labour movement will repudiate unity and struggle and sell out the resistance.
The most proper provisions and standards for Occupational Safety and Health at work for the time being are those contained in the original Act passed by the Parliament, assented to by the President and cited as Act 1 of 2004. The Rambharat-Manning-Guiseppi Amendments are a chilled water revamp and insulting attempt on the intelligence of the Members of the Parliament, Trade Unions and Workers of the Country.
We who understand what work is and how the production process is organized and the value of the person to that process must continue to insist that the decent thing be done : that the decision of the Parliament enunciated in Act 1 of 2004 be implemented and reviewed and amended as may become necessary later.
The Law! Before Act 1 of 2004 and after this imbroglio whatever Mr. Manning and the PNM and both factions of the UNC might do the first law was and continues to be that the worker’s first obligation is to self preservation – the protection of his life and limbs and that if all workers in the particular unsafe condition or environment were to respond collectively and in disciplined concert, they would each contribute to the maxim of their being their brother’s keeper.
That will never be sold out. That must never be compromised.
The Struggle continues! Aluto Continua! Be safe! Remember that accidents do not just happen, they are caused.