BLLAHWU must measure business against worker interests

Editor | Monday November 29, 2010 00:00

It does so, as we learn from a story carried in one of the pages in this publication, at a time when the trade union movement faces several internal questions, among them, the readiness to make the leap from the associations that they were, to real thoroughgoing trade unions.

The organisations are constantly bickering about their relative importance to trade unionism, some wanting to use their numbers against the others, and for that reason alone, seeking prominence by way of government recognition, and by their status at the bargaining table.

Clearly, the unions have not found a collective approach to their reckoning with government's appreciation of the ILO conditions that now permit them to organise and form trade unions.  The unions were unready, rudely so.

They now need to appreciate each other for the sake of their members, rather than to seek the attention of government and political parties at the expense of their constituency. One of the major issues that the BLLAWHU will have to address this week is its newly found interest in business enterprise.

It must be tempting for an organisation that commands large numbers to seek to woo larger business - where the workers are exploited - to donate cosmetic packages in the form of discounts on cell phones and other items of conspicuous consumption, in order to deceive the employees into believing that the business has their interests at heart.

Worse still, it could happen that the leaders of the trade union are tempted into making political decisions that favour their own appetite for self aggrandisement, where they will ensure that the get personal benefit from the investments of the union. It does not take much.  It could happen, as it did at government, that permanent secretaries and their deputies who sit on the management boards of these institutions, arrange that upon retirement, they find themselves executive jobs at the government para-statals.

It appears that the trade union, who complained against this administrative mischief, have now adopted it as a way of life for the union leaders. Many of them live luxurious lifestyles which are completely inaccessible to the workers that they supposedly represent.

These problems can only be answered by a determined membership that will fight, at whatever cost, for collective decision making about the use of their subscriptions and the might of their numbers. BLLAHWU should have the good sense to address those issues.