Newsday Editorial: Wages and PNM

The Editorial below has been reproduced from NEWSDAY

There are three areas in which the Opposition PNM truly lack the moral authority to speak or to issue advice to the PP: crime control, corruption and public sector wages, which is why we find it more than ironic to hear calls from Dr Rowley for Government to quickly settle salary disputes with the unions to avert a national strike.

If there was any government that was anti-local labour, it would have been the Patrick Manning regime, which came into office during the post 9/11 new millennium oil and natural gas boom and which squandered the extra money flowing into the Treasury on foreigners.

It never occurred to Mr Manning to settle wage negotiations or to offer public servants, TTEC and WASA workers five or ten-percent more. He was too busy erecting his skyscrapers that cost billions, most of which is still to be accounted for. 

Why bother with the headaches of employing local labour, when you have Chinese labourers to construct your massive Udecott projects? Mr Manning’s approach to labour and the unions was out of sight, out of mind, a policy he applied across the board. 

Instead of settling the wage negotiations with the police and army, Mr Manning erased them completely out of the picture by creating a private security force to secure his home and office. 

To these he paid from $10,000 to $25,000 a month while police and soldiers continued to subsist on incomes stretched to the limit by the out of control inflation provoked by Mr Manning’s runaway construction. 

He also imported scores of British policemen to work in his illegal police crime suppression unit — the SAUTT — to which he awarded the lion’s share of the police budget and resources.

We agree that the PP must do all it can to avoid a national strike which will greatly inconvenience and cause hundreds of thousands in losses, maybe more. But it must do its best without sacrificing the rest of the country. It is quite unfortunate for public servants that the PNM never offered them an increase when TT disposed of the funds.

However, with the wage bill presently in the billions and TT in the red, it is very unlikely Government can give in to demands for 40-percent, which is probably why some unions have already settled for the fivepercent hike and the back pay that comes with it. 

We do not want to take this country back into the grip of the IMF. Then we will really feel the pinch when we are forced to live in IMF imposed conditionalities and with structural adjustment programmes. In the 1980s, these led to massive disenchantment and to an attempted coup.

Would the Opposition have the present Government take us to the edge of anarchy once more? 

It is this newspaper’s view that we now face a national strike precisely because of Manning’s lack of interest in workers, his absence of a sense of responsibility toward them. 

He chose not to invest the hydrocarbon monies in people and passed the buck along to his successors from whom his party is now demanding that they pick up the tab for his past indifference to labour. 

It is almost disingenuous of the Opposition to have an opinion on this wage dispute matter. These are old lingering wage negotiations that the PP is now trying to resolve with reduced revenue. Remember that it was Manning’s government that offered the PSA one percent.

The 2011/2012 fiscal package has already seen a huge increase on last year’s. This is a giant budget. But the more we spend, the more we will have to borrow and thus the more we will owe in a time of international crisis with the economies of Europe’s boundary nations, the PIIGS, imploding and threatening to create a domino effect.

These are not the times for losing one’s fiscal head and we can only hope that both sides can reach an agreement that restores dignity to the wages of TT’s workers without taking the country to the brink of bankruptcy.

You can read the original in NEWSDAY