On the 81st Anniversary of the Butler Riots: MEMBERS NEED TO RESTORE TRADE UNION MISSION

On the 81st Anniversary of the Butler Riots:
MEMBERS NEED TO RESTORE TRADE UNION MISSION
June 19, 2018 marks the 81st anniversary of the anti-colonial uprising, popularly called the Butler Riots.
In those powerful days of workers’ struggle in 1937 waged from Point Fortin to Caroni, to Sangre Grande and Tobago, the fighting workers inscribed on their banner ‘LET THOSE WHO LABOUR HOLD THE REINS’. The reins they demanded to control were not merely to have some improvement in their wages and conditions of work, but to have control of the reins of political and economic power.
The workers’ demands of 1937 included:

• legalizing their defence organisations – the trade unions – to continue waging the ongoing struggles in defence of their interests in the workplace.
• increased wages in all sectors of the economy, old age pensions and general improvements in the conditions in which they worked and lived
• for self-determination for the entire nation – Home Rule (Independence from the colonial imposition)
• for the right to vote, no longer based on property ownership or ability to speak English which were used to deny the majority of citizens even the most basic level of participation in the political process.

This was no mere economic struggle. It was a challenge to the status quo going to the very root of the existing economic and social order and announcing the awakening of the working class in this country to its historic mission – to create a new social order with the majority in control.
To reduce the significance of 1937 is to misunderstand its fundamental value as the cause for which 14 martyrs, 60 plus wounded and hundreds of arrested workers sacrificed their lives, their bodies and freedom.
THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN TRADE UNION MOVEMENT
 While the awakening of the workers to conscious understanding of the Necessity of their Historic Mission to Hold the Reins of Power was at the heart of the significance of 1937, it also marked the birth pains of the modern trade union movement in Trinidad and Tobago.
There is a distorted version of history that suggests this as a result of the ‘goodness’ of the colonial masters through their Moyne Commission and the ‘sympathy’ of the Empire’s British Parliament.
From the recognition of the legal status of trade unions, the registration of unions began in earnest in 1937 starting with the Oilfields Workers Trade Union, All Trinidad Sugar Estates and Factory Workers’ Trade Union, Amalgamated Building Workers Union, Seamen and Waterfront Workers’ Trade Union, Public Workers Trade Union and Federated Workers Union.
In 1938, several more unions like the Railway Workers’ Trade Union, All Trinidad Transport and General Workers’ Trade Union, Civil Service Association, TT Union of Shop Assistants and Clerks, Printers’ Industrial Trade Union and the Tobago Industrial Union were registered. By 1939, there were 13 registered trade unions.
The unions recognised the Necessity for unity and solidarity, not only of the workers in each union, but among all the individual unions. They consolidated themselves into a national organisation of trade unions. The first such umbrella trade union organisation was established in 1938; the Committee of Industrial Organisation (CIO), led by Rienzi. It changed its name to the Trinidad and Tobago Trades Union Council (TTUC) in 1939.
THE LABOUR MOVEMENT FRACTURED
Having survived the testing years of the World War, in the context of the split in the world trade union movement into 2 major camps and because of internal squabbles, the trade union umbrella suffered its first fracture.
Seven unions left the TTUC and formed the Trinidad and Tobago Federation of Trade Unions (TTFTU) in 1950. This was the beginning of a series of such factional divisions in the national trade union.
By 1958, the unions re-united under a single trade umbrella, the National Trade Union Centre (NTUC).  
Ever since, the splits and reunifications have recurred.
The disruptions in the unity and solidarity of the movement have been the result of ideological differences and views on the mission of the workers’ and trade union movements; opposing stands on the introduction of legislation like the ISA; support for various political parties and even squabbles over ‘borderline’ issues and poaching.
The overall effect of the lack of unity among the unions has been the inability to advance the interests of the workers in their trade union aims and, in the mission, inscribed on the banner of 1937 – LET THOSE WHO LABOUR HOLD THE REINS!
THE STATE OF THE MOVEMENT IN 2018
The on-again-off-again unity of the trade union movement has led to the situation in recent years of the existence of not 2, but, 3 trade union ‘centres’ – NATUC, FITUN and JTUM.
These ‘centres’ routinely engage in exercises to decide which political party of the status quo to pin their hopes on. Some have reached the point of ‘negotiating’ agreements with political parties while in Opposition, knowing full well that such ‘memoranda’ cannot be enforced.
Several individual unions are also in a state of disorganization, some founded in the crucible years 1937-38. Education programmes and effective representation at various levels of the disputes process have been weakened or non-existent. There are even several unions which exclusively take up grievances and disputes on behalf of individual workers.
The strength of the trade union movement is based on the Unity and Solidarity of the workers and their organisations in fighting for their common interests and aims.
However, that is not possible in an atmosphere of division and disunity. That is the clear lesson of the entire history of the trade union movement since 1937.
MEMBERS MUST RESTORE THEIR UNIONS’ MISSION
With the approach of the 81st anniversary of the Butler Riots, some trade union leaders have, not for the first time, announced their intention to turn the commemoration of this powerful anti-colonial uprising into a mere ‘appraisal’ of the incumbent Party-in-Power and its leader, the PM.
The mission inscribed in 1937 was not ‘LET THOSE WHO LABOUR APPRAISE THE PERFORMANCE OF THOSE WHO DEPRIVE THEM OF THE REINS OF POWER’.
This now-ritual ‘criticism’ of the representatives of those who Own and Control Wealth and Power in the society is far removed from what was fought for by the workers of 1937.
The phenomenon of a union being ordered to reinstate the majority of its own workers, unfairly dismissed, must have those who sacrificed so much in 1937 turning in their graves at the sound of unions behaving more like the oil and sugar bosses of that period.
The members of the individual unions and of the trade union movement as a whole must organise themselves to ‘hold the reins’ of their organisations and put them back on the road that Butler and all the fighters of 1937 pointed to and acted on.
A mere formal ‘re-unification’ like the formation of NATUC in 1991 will not do.
Without re-establishing their own control within their organisations and building their Unity and Solidarity by fighting in support of each other and for the aims of 1937, the workers will forever be deprived of their most valuable defence organisations and the working class will never realise its mission to HOLD THE REINS OF POWER!
 
Clyde Weatherhead
A Worker Who Refuses to
Abandon the Mission of 1937.