#BTColumn – Of unions and political parties

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Marsha Hinds

The polemics that the Barbados Labour Party’s choice of candidate for the St. George North campaign has unleashed is interesting to read and listen to. Like the suggestion to rename the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, it throws up the dire need for opportunities for history to be taught to Barbadians in a way that is easy to receive and consume.

When we ponder the renaming of the Cave Hill Campus or the connection between trade unions and labour, what we are actually engaged in is the measure of the self-determination and independence project in Barbados specifically and the Commonwealth Caribbean generally.

Many people are not steeped in the history of this period, because we still conceive of history as the period of enslavement of African people without understanding the significant gains of periods subsequent.   

The historical record of how political parties and trade unions were formed in Barbados does not make the question of whether there was a connection between the two entities.

I think what we are grappling with is whether the connection between unions and political parties that undergirded the self-determination and nationalist period in Barbados remains suitable for the post globalisation phase of our existence – or indeed, if that connection was as useful as we previously envisioned.

The first clarification to be made in telling the story of the connection between trade unions and political parties in the 1930s was that it was ideologies and not people that connected trade unions to the political party.

The creation of both the Barbados Workers’ Union and the Barbados Labour Party were means to ends for Grantley Adams and not about Grantley Adams as an individual.

Adams returned from Oxford, England in 1925 brimming with ideas of the possibilities of reconstructing the lives of workers in Barbados based on his exposure to working in the Liberal Party.

He was drawn to the agenda being followed by the Party on issues such as the introduction of pension, social security provisions and the creation of small holdings inter alia.   

When Adams returned to Barbados, these things were foremost in his mind and the two structures he worked within – the party and the union – were geared toward forwarding his ideological agenda and not his career.

In reading the history of the early connections between the trade union and the political party, we also must not pretend that there were no complexities.

The ideology that Adams bought into while overseas studying had to be reconciled with the class relations in Barbados and his non-revolutionary tendency.

The reality for Adams was that in order to gain many of the changes he wanted to see in Barbados, not just policy and legislation would have to change but also the entire colonial landscape of the legislature and the labour environment in Barbados.

There is a clear and obvious danger to the investment that we have made in the politics of ‘strong people’ and Adams and his union and party ties is perhaps one
of the earliest examples.

The reconciliation to be made to get Grantley Adams closer to the policy he wanted to see but without widespread revolutionary action is perhaps another major reason – outside of shared ideology – why the connection between the union and the political party caused no serious contention.

To sum it up in a tidbit, while there is a strong historical record of an association between the trade union, the political party and the political strong man who led both, the political party and the trade union were tied in the way they were under Adams not because that was the best way to organize for the masses but simply because it was the way that better suited his personality, beliefs and comfort.

While it quelled violence in Barbados and made the middle class of which Adams was a part more comfortable, that legacy is also a betrayal of the power of a true mass movement in Barbados. It came at consequences such as the death of the Herald Newspaper and the destruction of pro black activist, Clennell Wickham.

As we answer about what was needed to create a strong and lasting Independence movement for Barbados retrospectively,  perhaps we can now say that the link between strong man Adams, the trade union and political party should have been counterintuitive to working class Barbadians.

That is the longitudinal history of the relationship between trade unions and political parties in Barbados. The relationship was never one without contention, challenge and discomforts. Several writers involved in constructing the nationalist narrative of the region have voiced concern about the intricate link between the political party and the trade union.

As early as the beginning of the more capitalist focused globalization shift in the Commonwealth Caribbean, writers examining the trade union movement detected the distrust workers were feeling for unions run by active politicians.

In the context of Barbados, beyond that historical questioning and the further shift of the 80s, there came the tripartite social partnership of 1993.

Where Grantley Adams’ Progressive League had to participate in the passing of the Trade Union Act in 1939, by 1993, the Government was creating a space at the bargaining table for labour.

Along with the inclusive stance of the Owen Arthur government, there is a clear split between trade unions and ideology, and some may even argue the usefulness of the trade union altogether.

In order to create a common strategy across unions, intellectual centres, communities and government for Barbados to ride out the financial crisis of the early 90s, Prime Minister Arthur created an inclusive space where he chose individuals based on their perceived singular abilities.

I have argued in other places that this approach to the period may have been healthy in the formation of a collective work agenda for Barbados, but it also destroyed several groups at the intellectual and ideological levels.

While the country may have benefitted from the pooling of the best talent, entities such as the trade unions and community groups faltered.

Another downside of the politics of inclusion was that individuals could be seen as politically useful, not for their community or activist work, but simply on their own
individual merit.

If it is a model that Toni Moore has used to come into elective politics in Barbados, it is more a model of the politics of inclusion that she has used and not the historical relationship between the trade union and political party. Had she used the trade union model, for reasons outlined above, the workers of Barbados would still have cause to ponder what is the usefulness of that model to them?

But the overarching point to be made about the period of inclusion and the Social Partnership arrangement is that it is the logical end of the trade union as it developed historically in the Barbadian space.

Ideologically, the Social Partnership completes the stymieing of the revolutionary tendency started by Grantley Adams in his expansion of the Progressive League/ Barbados Labour Party with its economic and social outreach arms.

If there is a seat at the table and open dialogue between the government and labour, there is no need for shut downs of the country and other types of protests that make the union truly strong.

The confrontational anti-colonial, pro black stance is the bedrock of the traditional Commonwealth Caribbean workers’ union. A focus on the economic wellbeing of Barbados is what went to the table of the Social Partnership.

The rest lopped off as the baggage of a bygone era.

It is left to be seen whether both Moore and the trade union movement as an ideological entity can survive this latest development.

Due to our heavy investment in the continuation of the politics of “political strong people”, I anticipate that there will be Moore to gain at the individual level than there will be to gain for the trade union movement – whose death knell is becoming deafening.   

Marsha Hinds is the president of the National Organisaiton of Women.