Robert Buddan, Contributor
THE PASSING of Hugh Shearer, the rise of Pearnel Charles as a front-running candidate to lead the Jamaica Labour Party, and the approaching celebrations of political Independence and Emancipation, give cause to reflect on the emancipation of labour in Jamaica. It is strange that the most recent and comprehensive history of politics and labour in the British Caribbean, just published in 2004, did not make a single reference to Hugh Shearer.
The commissioned study of Mr. Shearer's life referred to in Parliament last Tuesday by Dr. Davies should fill this gap and the parliamentary tributes on that day should be compiled for that purpose as well.
When Emancipation came, the Jamaican people were free but had no means of making their freedom worthwhile. They had little land, schools, houses, and no government to work on their behalf. They could only bargain with the one thing they had, their labour power. Labour strikes started the same year of Emancipation. By 1839, strikes were becoming violent. By 1848, ex-slaves thought the planters were going to reintroduce slavery on August 1 and the governor feared that the country was moving towards a class war.
The workers justifiably complained of scarcity of land, unreasonably high rents, taxes, and prices, and oppressively low wages. One estimate held that the cost of living in Jamaica was 30-50 per cent higher than in Great Britain. There was no justice to turn to. Most of the magistrates were the same planters and most of the cases tried went in their favour. This even caused Paul Bogle to operate a people's court system in St. Thomas in 1863, issuing summonses, trying cases and levying fines.
STRIKES AND LABOUR LAWS
The first labour strike in post-Emancipation Jamaica occurred right upon Emancipation in 1838 but the planter government responded swiftly. By 1839 an ominously named Masters and Servants Act forbidding strikes was passed. It was not legal to form a trade union in Jamaica until 1919 and even then a union could be sued for strike action. Yet, in 1871, trade unions were made legal in Britain and later in 1875 unions were allowed peaceful picketing and immunity from court action for strikes in that country.
The Masters and Servants Act carried the penalty of eviction from land and huts while the organisers of unions or strikes could face criminal charges. Workers were being charged rents for the huts they occupied and the land on which they lived for 'free' as slaves. In many cases, employers wanted to pay them half of what they considered a reasonable wage and charge them as much as 40 per cent of that wage in rents.
Such conditions forced workers to strike even though strikes were illegal. Strikes occurred in virtually every Jamaican parish on all the main plantations between Emancipation and the end of the nineteenth century. A good example was the four-day strike by about 1,000 dock workers in Kingston in the 1890s after which workers were encouraged by their leaders to form labour clubs and unions across Jamaica. Some illegal unions were formed but were usually not prosecuted because of the fear of riots, the embarrassment that unions were already legal in Britain, and because some of these unions were tactfully formed as local chapters of the American Federation of Labour. The first trade union among these was the Carpenters, Bricklayers and Painters Union (1898), formed by H.L. McKenzie who in 1901, also formed the Tailors and Shoemakers Union. Two more unions were formed in 1907 but were short-lived. By 1910, all of these trade unions had ceased to exist. Around the turn of the century other organisations begun to emerge. The Jamaica Association (1874), the National Club (1909) and the Jamaica League (1914) were the most important.
MODERN LABOUR MOVEMENT
Labour rebellions in 1937 and 1938 led to the formation of a number of trade unions, largely organised under the Trade Union Council (TUC), the BITU, and the NWU. The largest of them, the BITU, was formed in 1939. Bustamante later announced in 1942 that he would form a labour party to campaign for minimum wages, an eight-hour work day and old age pensions. That party was formed in 1943. It immediately won general elections in 1944. These early days marked the heyday of the party as a party of labour.
The party published its aims and objectives but had no organisational structure (until 1951) and its membership was made up of BITU members. Of the 29 candidates named by Bustamante for the 1944 General Election, five were from the BITU: Bustamante, Linden Newland, L.W. Rose, J.R. Henry and I.W. Barrant. The other 24 were non-labour candidates. The strength of labour in the party lay in its BITU base rather than in the party executive or legislature. The victory of the young Hugh Shearer in local government election in 1947 and in general elections in 1955 helped to give voice to the labour wing of the party in representational politics. But the party lost power in 1955 and when Shearer lost his seat in 1959 and the party lost elections again, labour reached a low point with only two union men in its ranks in opposition in the legislature.
POLITICS AND LABOUR AFTER INDEPENDENCE
When the JLP won elections in 1962 and formed the first Independence cabinet of Jamaica, only Bustamante, Shearer and Newland (Minister of Labour) among the 14 cabinet members, were close to the union movement. Over the years the BITU has provided many functionaries to Parliament, the Cabinet and to Local Government, including Mayors. Nonetheless, it was clear that a class from the professions and business had become quite influential by 1962, among them, Edward Seaga.
At the beginning of the 1960s, new union blood entered the party through Pearnel Charles, Errol Anderson and Cliff Stone. Ironically, Mr. Charles and Anderson naively entered on the business side of the party to work for Mr. Seaga in his constituency. Bustamante pulled them out and fired them from the union. Mr. Charles was to write later that probably Bustamante shrewdly realised that we were entering a relationship that could only bring us the grief and tragedy it later did. Hugh Shearer mediated and got them rehired. Mr. Shearer was to mediate on Mr. Charles' behalf again when in the 1990s, the Gang of Five affair broke and Mr. Seaga sought to alienate Mr. Charles and Anderson.
Although Hugh Shearer was prime minister and active party leader between the late 1960s and early 1970s, the party had shifted its weight to the business wing which confirmed its dominance under Mr. Seaga's leadership after 1974. In the mid-1980s, the JLP government faced a national labour strike against its policies of structural adjustment. In the heat of battle in the 1990s, Mr. Charles criticised the Seaga leadership for abandoning the party of Bustamante. In 1999, he was the nominee of the BITU and the preferred candidate of Mr. Shearer for a post as deputy leader of the JLP while Mr. Seaga supported Audley Shaw.
Leader of the BITU, Hugh Shearer, slapped the JLP by writing, 'The Bustamante Industrial Trade Union fully supports the candidacy of its vice-president, Pearnel Charles, for the post of deputy leader of the Jamaica Labour Party. We are sure that Mr. Charles will bring to the discussions at the highest level of the party, the concerns of the union which are largely ignored?
CHARLES' ADVANTAGE
In the perplexing ways of the party, Mr. Charles is now the presumed leader of a candidacy for leadership supported by favourites of Mr. Seaga if not Mr. Seaga himself. He has the advantage over the others of having outlined his vision of leadership in 'A Cry from the Grassroots' (1999). His challenge will be to transform his party of labour so that it transforms the labour movement in ways that will meet the expectations of a new economy, new class structure, and new political culture in the age of globalisation. It is the same challenge that Caribbean socialist and labour parties face. The Jamaica Labour Party must disengage from personal campaigns and concentrate on what the labour movement started out to do right after Emancipation to achieve the emancipation of labour and all people.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. E-mail: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
