Foreword

• Author: Noel Cowell/Clement Branche
• Pages: 9-12

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The history of the Caribbean is in large measure arguably the history of

Caribbean workplace relations. The transplantation of hordes of

involuntary labour from Africa and indentured servants - from Europe, then

Asia, after Emancipation - along with the exploitation, management and control

of all that labour over some four centuries, remain to this day a point of

departure for most, if not all, discourses on Caribbean social, political and

economic development. It stands to reason that persistent demands for change,

whether revolutionary or reformist, have targeted the transgressors (real and

imagined) for the remission of sins - such sins being evident in the consequences

of plantation slavery and the vagaries of colonial hegemonic rule. The constant

call inevitably makes sense to workers through their experience of

discrimination, inequity and injustice in the governance of the workplace where

the bulk of their waking lives is spent, from the time they enter the workforce

to when they depart it, either on retirement (via redundancy) or on the basis

of a too frequent arbitrary, and therefore controversial termination of service.

Workers in most Commonwealth Caribbean territories were to gain a

resonant voice in the political process as a result of the establishment of trade

unions through the mobilisation of the mass of the population constituting

"workers" and the parallel development of political activism through universal

adult suffrage which was to drive competitive electoral politics as well as the

two-party system with a strong trade union base. But this was correspondingly

not to be the case at the workplace. It is not by accident, then, that Michael

Manley entitled one of his many books A Voice at the Workplace for which

"voice" he had laboured for some two decades before formally entering politics.

As labour leader-turned-politician, he continued to advocate for this

“voice'”since he, like Alexander Bustamante and Hugh Shearer of Jamaica,

Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham of Guyana, Vere C. Bird, Robert Bradshaw

and Austin Bramble of Antigua, St Kitts/Nevis and Montserrat respectively,

like Ebenezer Joshua of St Vincent and the Grenadines and Eric Gairy of

Grenada, was regarded by his working-class constituents as a clear and present

voice for workers in the politics of the erstwhile colony struggling to become

a truly independent nation.

Foreword