Guyana must never accept the GAWU formula

NOVEMBER 21, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

Long, long ago, the trade union, GAWU, pulled out of the Trade Union Congress because it argued that it had thirty five thousand members, and yet in elections competition all the time, it failed to win the Presidency of the TUC. GAWU put forward a formula to defeat that recurring pattern. It suggested that allocation of seats on the TUC Council be based on membership. It was a nasty trap and the TUC never bought it. The formula went against the logics of the world. If GAWU had a membership of thirty-five thousand, then it meant that it was guaranteed victory at every election because the votes were just stacked in favour of GAWU. So a small union would never be able to win the Presidency of the TUC because once GAWU contested, the election result was commonsensically predictable. After all, five and five are ten, meaning, if there are thirty voting members and GAWU has sixteen, then the GAWU candidate is bound to win. When you throw in the sister union in the sugar industry, NAACIE, then under the GAWU framework, the TUC would have become a virtual toy in the hands of the sugar unions. Amazingly that GAWU demand made vociferously in the early seventies is still a vehement claim of GAWU. To re-enter the TUC, GAWU and NAACIE want the allocation of seats on the Council based on numerical strength. The world is not run on that type of crooked and crude reasoning. There are about two hundred sovereign nations at the UN. Small Antigua has the same vote in the UN General Assembly as the United States which has over 300 million people. On the vote to ban whaling, the small states are heavily courted by Japan so their votes can count. In the Security Council, China with a population of 1.3 billion people has the same single veto vote as France with 65 million. In other words, even the point three in China 1.3 billion is more than France’s population. If the world should accept GAWU approach to organizational behaviour, then China should have about five or six votes in the Security Council and about a dozen in the General Assembly. Moving the argument to the US, it can clearly be seen that this country should never accept GAWU’s corrugated position on the composition of the TUC and the Trade Union Recognition Board. In relation to the latter, the Government reduced FITUG’s board members by one. It was two. The TUC got two representatives. FITUG rejected the reduction and submitted the same immoral outrageous formula it has embraced since the seventies – we have more numbers than the TUC. Let’s look at the US. In the Senate there are 100 Senators that are elected from the fifty States. California has a population of 38 million yet it has two elected federal senators that all States are allocated including Wyoming which has a population of 584,153. Rhode Island is the smallest State in the US federal system with a land space of 1048 square miles. Yet it sends two federal Senators to Washington just like the largest State, Alaska with 665,384 square miles. When you bring the argument to Caricom, the logics make GAWU’s attitude more than nonsensical but downright silly. Guyana has one vote in Caricom, the same as Barbados. Guyana has 83,000 square miles compared to Barbados, 160. St. Kitts and Nevis with a population of 54,961 have the same one vote in Caricom with Jamaica with a population of 2,950,210. No amount of legal, moral and logical persuasion can convince GAWU that its number theory is one that the world does not accept. GAWU is in the same federation with three other unions, NAACIE, GLU, and CCWU so GAWU adheres more tenaciously to its number theory arguing more viciously that FITUG outnumbers the TUC. But this boast may be short-lived. The Trade Union Recognition Board has to start doing an honest day’s work. For long, there are many out there who claimed that the membership of the Guyana Labour Union would vote out Carvil Duncan if there was a clean voting system. No group in the GLU wanted to challenge Duncan because they felt and knew, that the PPP Government would not allow for fair polling inside the GLU because Duncan would be voted out. This writer believes that the Recognition Board ought to investigate union manipulation in the era of PPP’s domination – October 1993- April 2015. Some Berbice Bridge workers told me that GAWU was forced on them. Maybe even GAWU was forced upon sugar workers.