I’m both amazed and amused at and by the mishmash of the mix-and-match between arranged coincidences and interlocking contradictions involved in the contretemps of the lingering brouhaha over the recent stimulated and simulated events outside the Castries branch of the island’s first and only indigenous bank.
From afar, I tried last week, to follow online what the issues were, but even though they involved banks and money, I still had no figures on exactly what the workers were demanding, why – and/or how much it would cost.
I saw and heard wily commentators wildly dodging and dithering between dexterous and ambidextrous corporate and boardroom football tactics, going heads-over-heels, online and off, in sometimes sickening displays of selective amnesia and calculated carelessness.
The main players and actors involved – well-known to each-other – invented ways to invoke Julien Alfred’s worthy cash-reward from the bank that sponsored her as leverage in an unrelated trade union matter, proponents presenting balancing acts stilted on selected snippets, even agreeing to disagree on whether the bank was senselessly losing Dollars-and-Cents, or if the union was helping the workers better understand the sterling differences between Pounds and Pence and the common-sense of Making Dollars Make Sense.
Most Saint Lucians are still proud their ‘Penny Bank’ has become a billion-dollar Eastern Caribbean financial institution that also bought out the local branch of a colonial bank of Imperial Yore and that of a bigger regional bank in a neighbouring island – and was wise enough to invest in Julien Alfred long before others saw her Olympian potential.
But to use Julien’s symbolic donation from her bank as a crutch to stand any argument about money being claimed by staff is – in my book and by my account number – a red line no one should cross.
Cynics and critics willfully employ and deploy strange yardsticks to measure and quantify added-value to the bank’s possible material losses from a failed strike, vis-a-vis an undefined amount being demanded by striking workers dancing outside their workplace to festive drums for social media effect and asking drivers to ‘toot’ or ‘beep’ to support a cause they know-not about.
Heirs and successors of founding trade unionists – on both sides of the local penny – are also among those taking triple-jump positions to mask support or opposition, in ways that outmatch Thea Lafond, Dominica and the Caribbean’s 2024 Olympic Triple-jump Champion.
I also think it’s unfair to compare Julien’s million-dollar reward with whatever the Dominica government could have afforded her counterpart, as each was rewarded according to her government’s ability.
I often pain deeply over the way trade unionism has changed across the region over the past four decades, sometimes even mourning the death of the militancy that (once upon a time) saw workers and trade unions calling effective strikes – with solidarity and public support based on solid arguments.
Today, however, once-militant trade unions can call strikes at entities still able to keep their doors wide open while prancing and dancing staff outside end up being regarded more as pavement obstacles than protesting workers.
Among the visible and invisible social media influencers involved are silent players of the instruments behind the pavement music outside the bank’s main city branch, where the ‘Penny Bank’ I grew up with started its transition to what it is today.
Back in time (when Caribbean trade unionism was militant), the then-silent players solved industrial disputes with a few phone calls (like between the President of the Employers Federation, the Labour Commissioner and the union’s President), or through cordial related exchanges at social functions, always resulting in workers, employers and trade unions all going home satisfied – until the next dispute…
Today, however, dynastic linkage and industrial relations careerism seem to have outclassed and/or replaced the class struggle, unions demonstrably lacking the intestinal (some say testicular) fortitude to even care anymore about presenting workers’ cases to the public they serve, in ways they’ll understand.
As such, a ‘strike’ today is anything – including disgruntled workers being misled into playing ‘sick’ (actually wishing sickness on themselves) to justify not providing the services they’re already being paid to deliver.
In this Age of The Internet of Things, the battle here between the bank and the union is being waged more online than on the ground (or even underground), with high-decibel plaintiffs and advocates with variable levels of social media presence uploading and downloading accordingly through rhythmic doses of gyrating vengeance.
In the process, such workers can easily end up being condemned to the modern scrap heap of the type that recalls the sorry story of the derisive classification scornfully expressed by an anonymous local trade unionist of yore, who (allegedly) loudly proclaimed on a pubic platform: ‘The working class can kiss my arse, I’ve got the foreman’s job at last…’
This is the descent to which some have lowered what is still a proud vocation, except for those who do care about the sacrifices of the pioneers who created the friendly societies, credit unions and trade unions that emerged before and after 1938, when the St. Lucia Cooperative Bank was born.
The 1938 pre-war strikes crippled colonialism across the West Indies and also led to the creation of the trade union movement that fought for the equal rights of the poor majority in each colonial territory to vote through ‘Universal Adult Suffrage’ in 1950-51.
Those early unions also created the local West Indian ‘Labour’ parties that would win (virtually) all subsequent elections in every colony thereafter, right up to independence (between the 1960s and 80s).
Unfortunately, part of the local Penny Bank’s proud history is being erased by and for employees resorting to the last resort first, seemingly caring less about the effects of their actions against a bank they subtly claim doesn’t care for them as much as for Julien Alfred.
As always, the elasticity of intellect can allow smart stakeholders the luxury of stretching far enough to take sides in the name of independence.
But, just as even the longest rope has an end, elastic can only stretch that far…