Labour Day Nostalgia | Trinidad and Tobago News Blog

By Raffique Shah
June 26, 2024

I must admit that I get nostalgic every year when Labor Day rolls around. I was not present when Juneteenth was first declared a national holiday in 1972. Dr. Eric Williams’ administration has done a great job of sidestepping the significance of Juneteenth to labor history and the nation as a whole.

Those who understand the significance of this date know that on this day Tubal Uriah Butler, considered the father of radical labor, sparked the national strike by appealing to a large group of workers gathered for a meeting in Fizabad, asking them if they would submit to arrest by Constable Charlie King, a profoundly stupid man, brandishing handcuffs and a warrant for his arrest.

The crowd responded with a deafening roar of “No!” King persisted. He tried to arrest Butler above Borah’s store, but he was beaten to death by workers and fell downstairs, not far from the intersection named after him.

I am nostalgic because I miss the camaraderie of the early radical labor leaders. I am not judging today’s labor, where some leaders stand on the podium and publicly kneel before politicians as if they are fighters in the never-ending struggle for fair pay and better working conditions.

In Trinidad and Tobago, trade unions have a relatively short history. But trade unions have a long history in Britain, and trade unions in British colonies (like ours) were modelled on trade unions in terms of their structure, their approach to capital and the employer class, and how they treated and were treated by captains of industry, the powerful and the powerless.

Dr Williams’ lack of experience and work background in that era made his interactions with the unionists less awkward than they might seem. I have always thought that Williams’ early life was spent in middle-class seclusion. This was characteristic of the aspiring upper classes of African and Indian descent. For his part, he was undoubtedly a bright student, but as he grew up, his guardians, his family and senior scholars, helped to plan the lives of their talented sons and daughters, such as Eric Williams from Woodbrook, to become leaders of the nation.

Fast forward to the time when Williams won a scholarship to Oxford University. There he met like-minded non-white people who not only attended Ivy League schools but, like him, were ready to run their own countries upon their return. To them, Unionists were pests to be controlled. Nothing more, nothing less. When he became Prime Minister, he probably never imagined that he would ever have to deal with such people in his life. In fact, he had to interact with them. This explains why there are men and women in the upper echelons of the People’s National Movement Party who grew up among radicals and ideologues, as well as people at the grassroots level who can train the Prime Minister to talk to the influential leaders and managers in our society.

Among the trade unionists, many were drawn into the orbit of international ideology. The most notable of these were the AFL-CIO affiliates and the TUC affiliates. The Russians were there, of course; the left and right wings in the trade union movement were identifiable, and they explained the huge disparities in the labour movement.

The big trade unions, mainly in the North, were noticeably absent from the early May Day events in Fizabad. They did not mingle with leaders like Joe Young (TIWU), George Weeks (OWTU) and Lyle Townsend (CWU) and your humble scribe Rafiq Shah (President of the largest sugarcane farmers’ union). I found this rather unusual. I could be called a radical, I like to be called a revolutionary. I was not keen on marching or dining with the likes of Karl Tarr, Nathaniel Critchlow (NUGFW) and Ferdie Ferreira – whose influence was the antithesis of his small stature, Francis Mangrove (SWWTU) and others who all seemed close to the ruling PNM. It was inevitable that we would cross paths later in their lives and in my career.

Ivan Williams, on the other hand, is a completely different story. He was known as one of Eric Williams’ closest lieutenants in all of the troubled city housing settlements/developments that were dubbed crime hotspots back in the 1970s and even earlier. Ivan and Ferdy were the two PNM heavyweights that controlled those neighborhoods. I never really got to know Ferdy. He seemed to treat me like someone to be avoided. Ivan, on the other hand, was larger than life in many ways. I will return to this unfinished story shortly.