Letter: Roget and colleagues want to destory T&T economy

The real agenda of Ancil Roget and his colleagues is as obvious as the destruction which it threatens. 

It is as transparent as a sheet of the finest polished Venetian glass. Between '02 and '10 Roget and his trade union colleagues were deafening in their silence while Manning squandered the patrimony from boom to bust. 

From that silence one can only assume that union leaders were "as happy as pigs in mud', as were their members, neither requesting nor demanding a scrap off Manning's table. This was not difficult to understand. 

Then as now, the life styles of Roget and other agitators in the labour movement have remained affluent by comparison with any white collar executive and far removed from the blue collar workers that support them in the comfort to which they have been accustomed. 

Neither, given the basic salaries recently revealed, could workers in the hydrocarbon industry be considered economically exploited by their employers. Except for the absence of rigidly enforced safety standards on the jobsite, therefore, neither Roget nor his membership can credibly claim exploitation or abuse. Particularly not while the world is staggering toward economic meltdown and mass unemployment has become the norm in far wealthier societies. 

 

Why then this strident agitation in an already sagging oil industry?

How does one compare the aggressive stance of trade union leadership against the 5% offer by a cash strapped administration who inherited a looted Treasury, with the church mouse timidity of those same leaders while that Treasury was being plundered? 

Surely those boom years were their golden opportunity to claim their share of a much larger pie via extortionate wage demands? Was their deafening silence under the PNM motivated by memory of the violence with which their 18/3/75 march for "peace, bread and justice" was aborted - or was it simple political abnegation? 

Have they perhaps convinced themselves that they can now dictate with impunity to this ruling dispensation because it is led by a PM in a petticoat who is unlikely to submit them to a repeat of the police "body music" of the above date? Or is there possibly another more sinister and cynical agenda behind today's threats and bluster?

Roget and his fellow extortionists are well aware that with the best will in the world the Govt. simply cannot meet anything near to OWTU's ridiculous demands and those that will follow. 

Meaningful compromise will bankrupt a delicately poised economy with disastrous consequences for the entire society, including the labour force whose interest they purport to champion. 

This OWTU campaign is calculated to achieve exactly that --economic disaster and resulting destabilisation of the ruling dispensation and the society which rejected the PNM for it. 

They are committed to derailing and destabilising the PPG as the only means of precluding it's re-election in 2015. It matters not to Rojet and co. who will suffer if the economy grinds to a halt. 

They are not concerned if during their proposed 90 day strike their membership will be reduced to privation and crime, so long as they can realise their primary objective. 

Lest we forget, were it not for the disturbances of 27/7/90, despite the unpopularity of structural adjustments dictated by the fiscal mismanagement which triggered them, it is highly unlikely that a disgraced PNM could have regained power in '91. 

Nor would they have formed the government after 14/12/01 had Robinson not prostituted the majority vote of that date. Fast forward to 2012, a defeated and disgraced PNM languishes in opposition since 24/5/10 with little prospect of improvement. 

Enter Ancil Roget and his ilk attempting in 2012 to fill Abu Bakr's role in 1990 by sowing a similar crop of fear, confusion and economic disruption. The only thing not yet obvious to date, is the response of petticoat leadership to this latest manifestation of the PNM commitment to power at any price.

Cry the beloved country
TG Mendes