In the late 1970s, Jamaica experienced a surge in labour militancy, reminiscent of the early days of its labour movement. This period of industrial strife was influenced by both economic challenges and political rhetoric that highlighted class conflict.

Published Wednesday, June, 20, 1979

Labour militancy

By Carl Stone

I DO NOT THINK that there has been any period since the turbulent birth of our labour movement before independence that the Jamaican workplace has been more plagued with conflicts friction, antagonisms, and deep distrust between workers and management.

There is, I think, an interesting parallel between that early period and what is happening today in industrial relations.  In the genesis of our big unions in the 1940s and early 1950s, the conflicts at the workplace tended to mirror and express pressures and conflicts taking place in the wider society rather than local plant issues between workers and management.

 

The unions were fighting for a place in the power structure.  The conservative resistance of the merchants and planters provoked them into a style of extreme militancy.  This was aggravated by the intensity of inter-union rivalries.  Overall, however, the intensity of labour relations in that period was also affected by the political struggles of the mass parties - the JLP and the PNP - which were attempting to mobilise a new political consciousness among the working people.

As industrial relations became more regularised, and as the unions developed a life of their own outside of the arena of party politics, the industrial situation stablised although strikes continued, but not with the same intensity, bitterness, and antagonism (except in isolated areas such as the sugar industry).

By the 1960s, industrial conflict tended to be most pronounced in those companies where labour-management relations were known to be bad.  Advances in professional management made labour relations controllable as those plants that developed modern practices of personnel management and industrial bargaining found that it was possible to eliminate the excesses of antagonisms that plagued the industrial scene in the early period.

Pressures

All this rapidly changing in the 1970s.  The pressures have come from two sources: the one economic and the other political.  The rherotic of class conflict inspired by some elements of socialist pronouncements in the 1970s and the rherotic of hostility to owners and management spread by the populist political sentiments of the 1970s have both served to sharpen the distrust and antagonisms at the workplace.  Most of this class militancy has nothing to do with PNP doctrines and political propaganda.

On the contrary, the PNP picked and amplified the stirrings of class hostility that were a legacy of growing inequality within the society between the 1950s and the 1970s and frustrated but rising expectations and aspirations of the younger generation that came to adulthood after independence.

The new political mood was reinforced by the economic deterioration experienced by the working class since 1974 under a Government that offered great hope of liberation from the grip of poverty.  As the years went by, the PNP Government has been seen more and more by the working class as concerned primarily with unemployed sufferers, militant youth, small farmers, and ideological fringe groups.

As a party posturing socialism, it has been some of the major weaknesses of the PNP that in spite of having a former union leader at its helm, has never been  able to project a strong and credible identity with unionised workers, and its socialist ideas have mirrored middle-class radicalism  rather than working-class concerns .  The working class has had to bear the brunt of the economic pressures occasioned by economic management.

While PNP socialism encouraged and amplified the militancy of the Jamaican working class, the economic blight visited on this nation under the guidance of the PNP Government reinforced worker militancy by causing the working class to lose hope in the possibility of a socialist deliverance and thereby to increase their resort to higher levels of industrial militancy as the only weapon of class self-defence.

Most trivial issues

The result of all of this is that many areas of industrial conflict and disputes have nothing to do with labour relations in the plants where they occur but are really symptoms of the mood of anger, unrest, and frustration among the working class.  The most trivial issues now provoke strikes among groups of workers that had a reputation for industrial stability in the 1960s. Rational and professional methods of labour relations can no longer guarantee the elimination of the deep antagonisms at the workplace that were so widespread at the birth of our big unions.

The strike figures themselves tell this tale.  A comparison of the average annual level of strikes and industrial disputes over the period 1965-67 and the period 1975-77 reveals the following.

                                      Strikes per year                                 Disputes per year

1965-67                                           67                                                    223

1975-77                                            119                                                   581

Between 1968 and 1977, there has been a 120% increase in the number of industrial disputes recorded by the Ministry of Labour.

Any hope the Government has of reducing industrial conflict by the promise of a Social Contract (which the union leaders have rejected) is most unlikely to bear any fruit.

The working class has no faith in this Government. The Government has nothing to offer that class to appease their militancy.  Union leaders are swept along by the wave of worker unrest that no one is able to control although irresponsible leadership can inflame it.

Like all forms of political action, the excesses of labour militancy will only decline in intensity after it is discovered to be a futile exercise that provides emotional satisfaction but is unable to restore the living standard and purchasing power of those who utilise it.  Creative and strong leadership within the union movement can accelerate this process.

Even if the Government cannot offer the union movement workable Social Contract, the dialogue with the union will have to continue in the effort to encourage union leadership to play a positive role in ending the excesses militancy that are tragically crippling production in vital areas of the Jamaican economy and adding further to the erosion of working class living standards.

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