Countdown to Crisis... (Shutdown 2011)

As July 2011 comes to a close the people wait with baited breath to see just how bad things are going to get before they get better. United unions stand ready to shut the country down and the people are once again caught in a vice of political brinksmanship that threatens to derail every inch recovered since the economic slowdown began in ernest in 2008, leaving us further exposed to any fallout if the threatened double dip of the US recession materializes.

Both the private sector and the general public have been beseeching both sides to cool the rhetoric before things overheat, but labor's erstwhile leader Ancil Roget seems to have found himself in a place of no retreat and may have no choice but to follow through on his threats if he himself is to remain relevant after the dust finally settles.

That we should not still be finding ourselves negotiating increases for time past is a no brainer, and this impasse has less to do with the current administration and more to do with the last one and failure on the part of the unions to treat with the issue bi-partisanly and professionally.

In her first labor day in Office newly crowned Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar locked arms with her then comrades and put herself squarely in the mess by blurring the lines the employer/employee relationship, and by so doing exposed herself to demands that at some point were going to become unmanageable. Worse, because her government is seen as a labor government based on her Party's roots in the labor movement and the cozy relationship she offered the unions in the run up to the last general elections, conflicts were always going to lead to this.

Now the question for the population at large has to be where do we go from here now that these chickens have come home to roost. Do we call Roget's bluff and risk the aforementioned action and all its concomitant fallout?

Or do we seek third, fourth and even fifth parties to help mediate and prevent setting our self governance back a hundred years?

It is childish that a high powered meeting between both sides broke down over claims of who said what when, and while I am loathe to even look favorably in the unions' direction, Kamla and her government have some hard questions to answer as to what promises were actually made during the courtship phase of this relationship to get them on her side in the first place. On the unions' side no one seems to know exactly what it is they DO want, save and except that they want the five per cent cap to go. There is no getting away from starting negotiations at zero because that is where the ground is, but that does not mean that it has to stay at zero; similarly with the five percent, more is being made of that than needs to be, and to the public the unions are ignoring the global economic climate that is promising to get much worse before it gets better and threatens to affect us again and soon. This issue cannot be a partisan or emotional one, and while the workers have a right to be treated with respect around the bargaining table, the government has a right to be respected as the people's arbiter who are themselves demanding that any increases be pegged to productivity and increased quality of service, a notion noticably absent from the discussion.The politics of this dance cannot be the same old two step and all sides now have to see their position in light and in harmony with the other's. 

My suggestion - remove the cap, begin negotiating from zero and where possible offer significant increases subject to performance. Properly done we will all win, with the government gaining a workforce that is performance oriented, the workers getting a fair wage plus bonuses based on effort, and the people finally getting something like value for money where service and production in the public sector is concerned.

 Or we could go the other way - and allow tribal, juvenile, petty politics to keep us in the third world forever.