Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer
( L - R ) REID, ROBERTS and ALLWOOD-ANDERSON
PROFESSIONALS EMPLOYED by the Government may be about to forge a new alliance to bargain on members' behalf, making a clean break from the influence of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU).
The first indication of this has come from the leadership of the Jamaica Teachers' Association (JTA).
"That is something that we are going to pursue because it is the professional groups that are most dissatisfied" (with agreements being forged by the JCTU and the Government), Ruel Reid, JTA president, told The Gleaner.
Preliminary discussions have been held with other professional groups, he disclosed, with further talks set to take place "in the coming week."
President of the Nurses' Association of Jamaica (NAJ), Edith Allwood-Anderson, said her organisation has not been involved in discussions to form a new labour alliance.
"I don't know of such a thing (the alliance). At this time we do not have any mandate to do that," she told The Gleaner.
She said that the NAJ was currently in the healing process with its recent withdrawal from the JCTU.
"We need time to heal," she said, adding that the controversy surrounding the withdrawal was a bitter experience.
She also expressed surprise that Mr. Reid was talking of an alternative alliance when he was on the technical team that negotiated MoU2.
"That (the alliance) is just talk," she said.
CLAIMS DISMISSED
In a sharp rejoinder, a senior member of the JCTU has dismissed any claim that the confederation has failed its members.
"I think this venture to form a new body is a waste of time and will only serve to sow the seeds of divisiveness," was the brusque response of Danny Roberts, vice-president of the JCTU.
Reid's disclosure came in the wake of the teachers' decision on Friday to reject the Government's latest salaries and fringe benefits offer.
The package offered by the Government was constrained by provisions in the second public sector Memorandum of Under-standing (MoU2) negotiated by the JCTU, he complained, and vowed that the teachers would not allow themselves to be held back anymore by the central bargaining approach of the umbrella trade union body.
DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT
"The doctors, teachers, nurses and police work in a particular context. When you look at the average worker in the civil service, they are in a totally different kind of environment and when you have an omnibus agreement, which locks everybody into this straitjacket, it does not work for us," Reid asserted.
The JCTU was established in 1994. It emerged from the trade union solidarity forged a decade earlier in the Joint Trade Unions Research and Development Centre, influenced in large measure by two major figures of the political and labour movements, Michael Manley and Hugh Shearer.
Roberts, a member of the influential National Workers' Union, argues that the JCTU remains relevant to the interests of all the groups it has sought to serve, pointing particularly to the MoU process.
"For the first time, the question of wages and incomes policy has to be determined through consultation and dialogue with the trade union movement so that the available wage fund under the MoU is significantly greater than it would have been under the old system as a result of wage solidarity," he said.
Ironically, it was dissatisfaction with the negotiations for MoU2, which caused the NAJ to pull out of the JCTU and the JTA to abstain from some aspects of the agreement. The Police Federation and the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association (JMDA) were never part of the JCTU but, hitherto, had maintained a cordial working relationship with that body.
NEGOTIATIONS
And, in a not-so-subtle message to the professional bodies, Roberts is suggesting that they should carefully consider whether they are sufficiently competent to handle negotiations with the Government by themselves.
"Many of us in the trade union movement are trained, professional negotiators. The teachers, nurses and doctors are not professional negotiators. They have other areas of expertise. So it is understandable that when they venture outside of their areas of expertise you get these kinds of comments which do not reflect the dynamics of the negotiation process," he charged.
(Staff Reporter Dionne Rose also contributed to this story.)
