OWTU SPEAKS 2006 -11-01

 

Good evening and welcome to the OWTU Speaks?

 

We are astonished by the unexpected, modest complimentary statements contained in today’s Guardian Editorial.  We must suggest however, that the Guardian too, has missed a most salient point in the recent OWTU/Petrotrin salary negotiations.

 

And there could be no important reason for top OWTU executives, as claimed by the Guardian Opinion, to have resisted admitting that there may have been a trade-off between reduced wage demands and higher COLA.  Indeed, negotiations are about: ‘Give-and-take; trade-trade off; and compromise.’  Yet, we did not trade-off as much as we juxtaposed the two key issues of wage rate adjustment at market on the one hand and enhanced protection on the other. That is to say: we presented our case in a style and with a methodology such that the employer was forced to move progressively forward on both items rather than to pivot one and balance the other.

 

Our opening demand on salary was 35% and

Petrotrin’s was 6%.  The settlement has seen an average Monthly Paid salary of say $12,000 increased by 7.3% which is the real effect of COLA consolidation of $875. before the application of 15%.  Such a salary then has been increased by 22.3% and would positively impact further on such socio-economic issues as Pensionable  salary, Contributory Savings Plans etc.  And in so far as the waged worker is concerned at an average $7,000 per month outgoing – the consolidation of $691 before the 15% general increase has effectively brought a 25% settlement in such a case.

 

An objective and disciplined analysis of what was done would therefore show that on salary adjustments there was a settlement of 23.65%.  In the case of the new COLA formula and this emphasizes even more the absolute importance of the limited protection that is afforded by price related indexation – the new COLA formula was negotiated at 23cents per hour per complete point rise in the Official Index of Retail Prices for the waged employee and $55.50 per month for the salaried worker.  These numbers were previously 14c and $35.00 respectively.

 

All of these notwithstanding, we negotiated improvements on all other fringe benefits that are included in the Petrotrin Employees terms and conditions of employment.  And additionally, each Petrotrin employee is entitled to a negotiated equal share of 15% of that Company’s net Profits after tax.  The last such profit share saw each worker receiving a take home of $25,000.

 

Our piece today has sought to put our achievements in proper perspective and advise the few confused bad mouth suedo intellectuals and misleaders in the other labour camp that they will not do it better than the OWTU. And this may well be the fief reason that we may always be wrongly accused of poaching.

 

Aluta continues!  Long live the OWTU!

Have a peaceful evening.  Look out for the children, save the Youth. I am Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU Speaks.

 

 

OWTU SPEAKS 2006-11-03

 

Good evening and welcome to OWTU Speaks! We wish to attempt - but only briefly – two issues, maybe three, in this evening’s commentary.  The first is obviously our bounce from too long a string of lack lustre performances and defeat, to yesterday’s demonstration of the soca-reggae art if cricket and our comprehensive demolition of South Africa in the ICC Champions Trophy semi-finals in Jaipur, India.

 

Chris was no ‘Gayle’ force wind yesterday, He was the ‘category 133’ Hurricane that flattened South Africans’ carefully constructed decking of 238 runners. He was partnered by a no less stormy and dominant Berbice Tiger whose hunger propelled the most remarkable of dispatches of a six-run shot over long-leg.  Chanderpaul was superb. This opening pair raised our West Indian noses as the proud grand-folk would have said. Our scintillating victory was however, the result of an overall good team effort.  The team must go to Mumbai on Sunday with the vibrations of every last Caribbean citizen urging them on to continue doing us proud.

 

And talking about cricket – it seems that somebody get good bat to dismount ‘dey’ high horse and have a conversation with the ground on the pros and cons, benefits or drawbacks of Aluminum Smelters.  We hope that whatever bat they got, has had the effect of knocking aside some rocks and ameliorating the cerebral paralysis to which arrogant leaders sometimes become prone.  In our piece last Monday we knocked the arrogance of those who, in all of their industrial expansionist ambition, will refuse to dialogue with and convince the opponents to smelters being constructed here, that the smelters are safe and environmentally acceptable to our development goals on the basis of technical and scientific investigation and proof only.   If our bold and fearless criticism has in any way contributed to this 11th hour apparent softening of positions – the ‘OWTU Speaks’ is considered to be serving an important purpose.  We hope that the administration is serious and not engaging in filibuster and dilatory tactics.

 

Additionally, we are identifying a number of very serious issues which demand urgent attention and meaningful and thorough-going discussion.  Whither goest Trinidad and Tobago?  Who knows, and how many really know what is happening in the economy?  Are there real threats to our already fragile democracy?  The ordinary people need to know! We demand that we know!  In these regards and particularly in light of major threats to the interests of working people and citizens, the OWTU will host another of its Public Policy Forums on Wednesday 15th November, this month at our Head Offices in San Fernando. 

 

We will highlight two major issues:-

 

One – “The Economy: crisis in the boom” – There is, we believe, an underlying crisis in the middle of the country’s current economic boom.  Manifestations of this are very high food, property and building materials prices; the neglect of agriculture and the death of farming; inflation; the misuse of the country’s ‘golden age’ wealth; and the attempt to use the rising inflation rate to attack workers’ and undermine the Collective Bargaining Process by falsely blaming wage increases for fuelling the inflation spiral.  There is also an unhidden attempt to impose more stringent neo-liberal policies including Union busting and the break up of the cooperative movement.  Two – “The Spectre of Constitutional Dictatorship” – There is a major attempt by the Government to usurp the earlier call by ourselves and other NGO’s for Constitution Reform and the deepening of the democratic process.

 

This usurpation has seen the Government attempting the imposition of a top-down process of constitutional reform.  The sole aim of which is to create an Executive President which would effectively concentrate all power in one office and person.

 

Our Forum on the 15th will treat with these two issues by enabling an analysis from the standpoint on the peoples sector on the ‘one’, and by raising awareness amongst important social organizations of the dangers of the other.

 

Have a very good Friday evening and let us all subscribe to making this a peaceful and incident free weekend.

 

I am Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU Speaks!

 

 

 

OWTU SPEAKS 2006-11-06

 

Good evening and welcome to the OWTU Speaks!  Another Central Bank Governor – incidentally also named Williams – has been examining the causes and effects of inflation on her country’s own economy and the development programmes being pursued by her government, and not once did she accuse workers’ salaries and wages as being contributory to that current Barbadian experience of growing inflation.  Indeed, we have deduced that very much like the situation affecting the ordinary people in Trinidad and Tobago, wages in Barbados are also lagging behind and fighting to catch up with prices and base line inflation.  And as a matter of significant importance, we feel impelled to inform the Trinidad and Tobago worker that his Barbadian Counterpart and comrade has been working under a ‘tripartite’ social compact – between Government/Labour/Business – in which labour is squeezed between Government and Business and that it is such a compact that certain labour advocates in confederation with big business here are proposing to be established in T & T.  The OWTU has made its own position clear.  We have made it superlatively clear that our wages and salaries are not going to be knocked to the floor and tied to productivity increases while prices and government spending escalate through the ceiling. We must insist that with everything else going up – the price of food, rents, property, building and construction materials, Ministers’ and top officials’ Salaries and perks and government’s massive spending – some of them astronomically and others appreciably – the drawers of water and hewers of wood will not be left as far behind as some government and business spokespersons are enunciating.

 

It is suggested for instance, that likely increases in the prices of flour products may explain why the Prime Minister’s less-than-sensible assertion last Thursday, that double digit inflation was no cause for panic. Could it have been that the Prime Minister was attempting to apply some temporary blaming of the obvious excruciating pain of a considered National Flour Mills increase in the price of its flour products in response to a some 34% increase in wheat prices climbing over the past three years?  How does the NFM deal with that issue of wheat producers’ ice hikes whether they are the incidences of poor weather in the producer countries or like in the case of corn where more of that commodity is directed to ethanol production than food supply?  And how does the local economy deal with those issues of imported high prices except than by local expansion of the food and agriculture sector providing decent and sustainable jobs at the same time.  It is so ironic and consummately neo-colonial in nature that we subsidise the big business that is American farming and agriculture through the very favourable pricing structure that provides cheap gas for the manufacture of fertilizers for the export market.  We then turn around and are made to pay the market price as determined by the foreign trader for his agricultural produce.  Really, we have all the basic inputs and some know-how and technology for domestic self sufficiency in some areas of food and agricultural except that our vision is constrained by political myopia.

 

Have a good evening

 

I am Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU Speaks.

 

 

OWTU SPEAKS 2006 11 08

 

Good evening and welcome to OWTU Speaks!  The Republicans have lost the House but one is quite certain that the United States’ interests and its political relationship with the rest of the world will essentially be the same.  That is so because the American is for America above all else – conservative democrat or right wing republican.

 

One is also with the strong view that President Bush was more concerned with keeping Daniel Ortego out of the Nicaraguan Presidency than he was with Oliver’s republicans of the ‘North’ retaining power in the United States Congress and Senate.

 

He was defeated and sent into his own bush and on both counts however.  The uni-polar might of the world’s top cop is receding.  Britain is an awkward hitch-hiker whose clumsy attempts to jump – off the runaway mid-east/Asia-pacific train piloted by Bush is posing as dangerous a challenge for Blair as the day he hopped on.  Tony’s bungling has emphasized that as good a labouring acrobat as he may have practiced, he certainly does not possess the gait to completely assimilate the Texan political maneuverings of global policing of the Bush/Rumsfeld/condescending Rice vintage.

 

The next two years – certainly during the next 4-5 years – we should see a number of people picking up their cudgels again in their campaigns for self determination and genuine independence in a more inter-dependent world community.

 

In the Americas change has been quietly taking place bar some saber rattling here and there.  The people have come to realize that in truth, the United States does not have friends, it safeguards its interests.  They have become more conscious today that the US interest is not in the development but the exploitation and mendicant subjugation of the countries in its sphere of influence – and that the US policy of underdevelopment of 3rd World States became even more pronounced after the collapse of the pre 1989 bipolar relationships which offered choices in the sometimes confused geo-politics.

 

Choices are becoming more possible again and democracy is being given new life.

 

Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has been made to resign.  The American people defied the pleasure of their President and forced the departure of War Minister, Secretary Rumsfeld.

 

The people of Cuba, punished as they have been by a pernicious 45 year trade and economic embargo imposed by the United States, continue to pursue their system of government and defend their sovereignty and independence.

 

The Brazilian people chose the former labour leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as their President in 2002.

 

Lula is known to be a socialist and committed Brazilian and was popularly re-elected last month, October 29.  Venezuela chose socialist Hugo Chavez to lead its people.  He was temporarily deposed with alleged backing by the State Department and soon enough, popularly re-installed by his own forces and the masses of the Venezuelan poor.  Chavez is poised to resoundingly sweep the poles in a reelection attempt in the next two weeks.

 

The Chilean people defied all of the right wing tendencies and instructions to the contrary and elected socialist and former political prisoner, Michelle Bachelet to the Presidency of that South American country.

 

New political kid on the block but seasoned leftist6 campaigner for workers’ and farmers’ rights, Evo Morales was resoundingly elected just short of a year ago, to the Presidency of the Republic of Bolivia.

 

Nestor Kirchner and Tabare Vasquez both left leaning have been popularly chosen to lead and govern Argentina and Uruguay respectively.  The state department is smarting under these shifts that the pendulum has made and the prospects of this for politics, trade and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

CLR James’ furrows into the’ Future in the Present’ remain insightful.

 

Have a reflective and peaceful evening.

 

I am Errol Mc Leod for OWTU Speaks!

 

 

OWTU SPEAKS 2006 – 11 – 10

 

Good evening and welcome to the OWTU Speaks!  Some of us hold a view that those who are always timidly cautious that they might offend others, are also always cowardly unobtrusive about defence of one’s own well being against others.  It was so disappointingly foolish when asked to comment    on the outcome of last Tuesday’s US mid-term congressional elections, Foreign Affairs Minister, Arnold Piggot declined, saying, that ‘Trinidad has a policy of non-interference in the affairs of other countries, and I can’t comment on that.’

 

Now – tell me something! Does our Foreign Affairs Minister understand the affairs of international politics and the skills required for the job of the country’s top diplomat?  Or, was Mr. Piggot just lucky to have had his name pulled out from Mr. Manning’s gift box or reserve candidates for those public offices which fall under the purview of Prime Minister?  Could the Foreign Minister not have commented on that matter of very significant international import without seeming to be injuriously interfering in the United States’ internal affairs?  Or does he not fully comprehend what it means to interfere in another country’s domestic affairs?  One heard the comments of Australia’s Prime Minister who allied with the Bush Administration in the War in Iraq.  Mr. Howard spoke, among other matters, about the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as an apparent consequence of the US Citizens’ intervention by their vote in the democratic process in altering the administration’s foreign military policy.  Yet Mr. Howard can hardly be seen to have interfered in Uncle Sam’s internal affairs.  It is perhaps purely a case of Mr. John Howard having a view on important matters which demand one’s formulation of a view – a sensible view.  Hear this: ‘Former Foreign Affairs Minister, Honourable Knowlson Gift, resigned from the Patrick Manning Government some two (2) months or so ago.  Details of the reason for this demission from office were not given except that the population was told – and that was not refuted – that there were serious disagreements between the Prime Minister and the Foerign Affairs Minister.  Mr. Pigott recently hosted a farewell function in Mr. Gift’s honour and it was reported that at that function, the US Ambassador here, Mr. Roy Austin not only commended Knowlson Gift on the excellent work and achievements of the latter but additionally and very emphatically, Mr. Austin identified our former Foreign Affairs Minister as a giant of a diplomat and Trinidad and Tobago’s Gift to regional and international relations and a well established foreign policy framework – ‘my emphases.’  Now – could Mr. US Ambassador be reasonably accused of meddling in our domestic affairs?  One might think not! Another might introduce simple logic and say ‘if Prime Minister and ex-Foreign Minister did not see eye to eye and disagreed to the extent that Foreign Minister had to go – and foreign Minister is later found to have been knowledgeable, high performing, well respected, strategic thinker and policy initiator and giant – it is most reasonable to conclude that in the disagreement just mentioned, the Prime Minister was in the wrong.’  And, to have emphasized that through this perhaps ‘half logic’, was the US ambassador interfering in Trinidad and Tobago’s internal affairs? 

 

Come on Mr. Piggot, in Foreign Affairs one needs to be fleet footed, possess plenty common sense and a gift of the gab.  How about extending congratulations to Daniel Ortego of Nicaragua?  Would Uncle reprimand you for not sticking to your policy of non-interference?  What a dumb excuse!

 

Have a good evening and enjoyable weekend T & T.

 

I am Errol Mc Leod for OWTU Speaks.              

 

 

 

OWTU SPEAKS 2006 – 11- 17

 

Good evening and welcome to the OWTU Speaks!  The footage was sound edited – it just had to be edited or there would be a call for the responsible television media personnel to resign or be summarily dismissed.  Even the deaf who was looking would have heard the profane word from the picture that he would have seen in the mouth formation and facial expression of the offender.  The MP for Point Fortin could hardly be more lewd, ludicrous and low classed.

 

Yesterday’s wise folk used to admonish that ‘if you were not too to stoop, children were not too young to peep.’ Mr. Achong bent so low that his inwards exposed the stink of a representative whom even barbarians would loathe.  Whom does that MP expect to hold any respect for him after his most disgusting behaviour at the public symposium in Chatham last week?  Whom does he think he is to expect that his bullying will have anybody fall in line and quietly acquiesce to his (the MP’s) political boss’ insistence on drawing this country into the operations of global military complexes?

 

We had earlier insisted that to build or not to build aluminum smelters here should be determined on the basis – not of emotion and skewed political ambitions on industrialization by putative fathers of the nation – it should be determined on the basis of proven technical and scientific investigation that the smelter operations are conducive environmentally and appropriate to our development, and that the anti-smelter campaigners may well be convinced by this approach.

 

We though that our voice might have contributed to the 11th hour veering to dialogue and information discussion.  Low and behold, yesterday’s ardent pilot of guidelines and regulations on issues of the environment, safety and health of workers and communities – to save his political hide – repudiates environmental concerns and undemocratically and odiously seeks to stifle expressions of dissent.

 

But Larry Achong is right – nobody can fire him as a Member of Parliament even as his repulsive behaviour helps to bring that august institution into disrepute.  However, he is wrong if he thinks that his despicable display and the behaviour of his arrogant associated and brethren might be easily forgotten.  If he possesses any common sense which these days is not common, he will humble himself and issue a public apology.

 

‘If you not to old to stoop, subordinates are never too young to peep.’

 

Have a good evening Trinidad and Tobago, and enjoy a peaceful weekend.

 

Demonstrate wholesome examples to the young.  Save the Youth.  Show the profundity of value over the cosmetic of price.

 

I am Errol Mc Leod for the OWTU Speaks.