Don’t Stop the Strike! The Guyana Teachers’ Union and Independent Labour Struggle in the Caribbean
Whatever happens now, the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) Strike is a defining issue for the region. In the end, the strike is not only a matter of money or social benefits being fought for in one sector of labour in a single Caribbean territory. The fight against starvation wages will continue by workers in all sectors, including educators. But this, too, opens the door to consider again the role of independent labour in re-arranging politics, government, and Caribbean society at large.
In the Caribbean and International Tradition
What we are about to say is in a Caribbean and international tradition of workers’ autonomy and self-directed liberation. Our people have respected these traditions in the past. Our sensibilities come from historical rank-and-file struggles in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, but also the US, Canada, and UK. Still, what we respect can only be what reinforces our political desires for autonomy and self-government that visions of national purpose and national development have long overlooked or undercut.
Across the Caribbean, trade unions have not been fighting friends of labour for some time. Revitalization requires self-directed mobilization but also renewal of political strategies. This cannot be done if we defend labour protest as ‘non-political’ and wish to sustain a social contract with the capitalist state and its pretenses.
Labor Action: Political or Non-Political?
The present Guyana Teachers’ Strike is political. All labor action is political. Many insist the strike is non-political. Few understand why. To claim that the strike is non-political is to concede that party politics hold a monopoly on the expression of politics in the Caribbean. But one need not pledge allegiance to a party leader or trade union bureaucracy to put politics into action.
Any independent act by workers to alter the terms of their role in society is political. Acting on its own authority in the “go slow,” the sit-down strike, the walk out, the picket, acts of insurgency, disobedience, and sabotage, strikes are not merely a temporary refusal of work. The strike (of private or public sector workers) does not presume a moment of compromise with capital and the state. Rather, in the space of the strike, relations between working people are partially remade independent of their rulers and exploiters. The strike camp is a social arena, a school for designing a society, a marketplace of ideas for mutual aid and self-government, creative thought, and awakening. If this is not politics, then tell us: What is?
When we have inspired conversations in our informal work groups, expressing a mix of anger and laughter at the rulers’ expense, some respond with wide eyes at certain proposals. When we champion the capacity of ordinary people to govern themselves, some ask: “But can we really do that?” But as fellow workers explain, our struggles are on the brink. This has nothing to do with press conferences of trade union officialdom who tell the government ‘‘we are not political.’’
Today, the teachers of Guyana are at the forefront of a stirring awareness. Though not knowing exactly what they want (beyond more wages and benefits for each toiler and their family), they are stretching forth their hands and minds to the next development in political thought among Caribbean workers. They need not know exactly what they want to engage in politics. What they want will become clear in the process of struggle — the strike itself. The strike is not merely a defensive tactic against capital. It is a place where ordinary people come to know their power in and for themselves!
That the teachers do not declare themselves a political party, seek to contest elections, or preach the doctrines of “Marxism” or “socialism” does not change this inalienable fact. At the same time, it is clear that aspects of the Guyana teachers’ struggle expresses an instinctive judgment to push their official leaders from behind. Readers of Clash! should want these half-buried impulses to fulfill themselves. But too many ‘progressives’ fear the authority of the teachers and working people independent of their designated leaders in trade unions and political parties.
Here, we might recall the debates between the New Beginning Movement (NBM) and United Revolutionary Organisation (URO) on the campus of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 1976. Frustrated by a repressive university administration, the UWI Student Guild called an open meeting. Nearly the entire student population turned out and proposed a total shutdown of the campus. URO cadres sought to “nip any spontaneity in the bud” by containing the strike and redirecting efforts toward Marxist-Leninist study groups.
The NBM’s Bukka Rennie responded with an address, “Don’t Stop the Strike.” The dilemma of 1976 in Trinidad is that of Guyana today. Should we stop the strike and organize seminars to raise working people to the proper level of consciousness as political actors? Or should we rally around the strike to insist that this form can be the greatest possible expression of ordinary peoples’ desire to alter the conditions of their workplace and society?
To refuse to stop the strike, to refuse to attack and discredit what is termed ‘‘spontaneity,’’ is not to dash organization away. If a politics of self-emancipation is not organized, it is dependent on official political institutions and its degrading premises. Will labor’s “organization” dictate to the workers how they must proceed? Or will the contours of our organizing emerge out of the needs and desires of working people who dare to clash with their rulers and bosses?
We need to inquire, among Guyana and Caribbean rank-and-file workers, how will we organize ourselves when the “dues checkoff” that collects union dues from member salaries is repressed by the State? Those who have regional and global historical knowledge of labor, not simply of bureaucratic formations, can be useful.
What Labour Defense Requires
Defense of labor requires proper awareness of traditions of struggle. Labour parties and trade union hierarchies have their traditions. These are not the tradition of independent labor whose strike action seeks the rule of the majority by direct democracy and workers self-management. There is no official trade union authority, whether governments affirm them or not, that point us in this direction. Following a long tradition of wildcat strikes waged in defiance of the union bosses in Guyana, we must do it ourselves.
The Guyana government has attacked the Guyana Teachers Union, presently on strike, and the Public Service Union, not on strike but wishing to negotiate for better pay and conditions with strength. The government has attacked by discontinuing the dues checkoff as a means to decertify or undermine the legitimacy of these trade unions. This shows the dastardly quality of those who rule above society in Guyana. Still, this means of attack on the dues checkoff —whatever Guyana and Caribbean courts decide minute to minute — warrants another look.
The government’s attack on the dues checkoff does not clarify our principles, what we stand for. Where it is against us, we still need to clarify what we are for. We must remember Caribbean workers organize their unions. Caribbean unions do not organize the workers. Too many have built careers and public personas as ‘‘labour leaders’’ only to demonstrate contempt for their own rank-and-file when they indulge a moment of spontaneity or creative self-direction. In the face of state repression of organized labour, are Guyana’s teachers prepared to wage a strike without the aid of their union chiefs?
With or without the dues checkoff, we must insist that the strike continue. Can teachers independently collect union dues, not to underwrite the salaries of union bureaucrats, but to create mutual aid and solidarity funds? As teachers militate against the terms of their employment, they may develop their own visions for education, economics, and social welfare. Other sectors of workers may join them.
Aspiring unity around proper principles is crucial. Many, thinking they are spry, will say that people rebel for food, not for any metaphysical principles or beliefs. Who proposes to say the rank-and-file toilers of Guyana (Indians, Amerindians, and Africans) don’t believe in a god or gods? Ordinary people maintain their own faith and principles. They don’t counter-pose their beliefs to food and rent money. This is the disposition of the ‘scientific’ socialist activist with an administrative rationality that wishes to nip any spontaneity in the bud. Indeed, working people are not merely objects of charity or political hand-outs. They carry with them ideas of the good life and proposals for the organization of a new society.
These proposals can only manifest and take hold with the aid of a rupture — a clash — that suspends the usual order of things. The strike is not merely the absence of work. It is a space of creative potential where working people can dwell in common and reflect on the values of those who rule over them with an iron fist. Working peoples’ consciousness of their own power can emerge from the experience of the strike, the organization of solidarity funds, and the construction of new proposals for Guyanese society. This consciousness need not be consistent or whole for the strike to continue.
Some Guyanese teachers regret the conflicting tendencies within the trade union struggle. We say, creative conflicts emerge in all freedom movements. As Rennie observed in 1976, “to say now, stop the Strike and start seminars, no revolt, no action, until the masses are totally clear of bourgeois ideology is to be unrealistic dreamers and deny the masses the very process of revolution, the only means through which they can free themselves.” If the objective of those who wish to propagate the destruction of hierarchy must be to “give the greatest possible expression” to the desires for autonomy that dwell among the masses in the strike itself, who will rise to the occasion? Who will engage teachers themselves and evangelize proposals for a new society in Guyana? Who will transform the words of social media posts and editorials into deeds? Who will spread the spirit of this strike throughout the Caribbean? The individuals and small groups that do so can emerge from these or other teachers. But they can surface among toilers and commoners in any sector.
Not Since Adam, Eve, and Noah, But Collaboration by Labor’s Aristocracy
Dues Checkoff, or the agreement of employers to collect union dues out of workers’ salaries, while part of a tradition of labor organizing that goes back many generations, was not a victory of those who maintained independent labor action against state and capital. It does not go back time immemorial. It originates in the 1930s, the Age of the New Deal in the USA, and the rise of the Labour Party in Britain.
The labor laws established by the American and British governments, and later models for international law and multi-lateral agencies, divided the trade union movement. It divided those who took independent labor action from those professionals who manned the trade union hierarchy or trade union officialdom and told people what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strikes were, what was respectable and responsible action, and what was illegal. Dues checkoff was the victory for trade union officialdom, a bureaucracy of professional staffers, who very often, did not work side by side as peers with fellow workers in their workplaces.
This is the language of the Guyana government at present. Why are so many experienced activists ‘surprised?’ Clash! would like to suggest that we are for the labor strikes that misbehave; we are for the independent labor action that invades politics as official society knows it or wishes to keep it for themselves.
In exchange for dues checkoff, official labor leaders and the rulers historically agreed when it was wrong to go out on strike in solidarity with other workplaces, to go out on strike with an interest in opposing or replacing the abusive government. Consistent with the age of the Covid-19, there was even language in the past about who were ‘essential workers’ as a means of disempowering and abusing major sectors of labor. Whether teachers are ‘essential’ or not, they are being attacked for standing up for themselves. We must be clear, when labor stands, official politics must tremble.
From Dues Checkoff to Militant Labor Struggle
What was said to be illegal by official labor law was of course the principles of rank-and-file union democracy they tried to convince labour to discard. These were not utopian ideas. Rather, self-governing general strikes were carried out for three generations before these labour laws were established all over the world. Not simply in imperial centers but in peripheral colonized territories. The general strikes — not merely strikes for more wages — formed the base of the original relationship between Caribbean labour and the anti-colonial movement in the 1930s.
The Guyana government at present manipulates unfolding insurgent labour telling them what is illegal — that is to be expected. What may not be expected is how many pro-labor advocates will also find a means to do so. The question is: By what measure will we evaluate political ideas and strategies said to be ‘pro-labor?’ Will it be only which brings us transitionally more wages, pensions, and healthcare? Or will it be an approach that brings us also more direct self-governing power?
Remember the history of Caribbean and global labour when there was no dues checkoff? For three generations before, labor fought management (and their hired goons) in the streets. From the 1870s to the early 1930s, autoworkers, maritime and dockworkers, textile workers, oil and chemical workers, miners, railroad workers, telephone workers, teachers, tourist industry workers, not one sector of labor was paralyzed in their independent action by not having dues checkoff.
Further, these toilers coordinated themselves when there was no Internet, smartphones, computers, or digital avenues of circulating information like flyers, newsletters, and journals. Even if Guyana remains divided between urban and rural, and across waterways, modern forms of communication are much better than one hundred years ago. It is alright to be sympathetic to the limitations ordinary toilers face to organize themselves. It is not alright to confuse this with the burdens of their trade union officialdom.
Those who know Caribbean labor history intimately know, consistent with developments abroad, on occasion a trade union cultural apparatus can be useful. Not a result that there is a difference between business unionism and social unionism. Rather, there have been some who have not feared agitating against the state and capital. But most have got themselves entangled in unproductive electoral campaigns. Elite representative government cannot defeat brutality and exploitation — that is its nature.
Watch Out for ‘Changing Clothes’: The Leaders and the Parties Deceive
It is crucial at this high tide of multi-racial unity to make sure we bring to an end any talk of the PPP as the ‘curry’ government. It is one of many potential capitalist governments — all of which we must oppose no matter the ethnic leadership. Where the PPP survives current strike action, it does not mean it is not tottering. It will not be kicked down with the false ideas of those in opposition who propose to fight ‘corruption’ with Black capitalist dreams.
Guyana labour, with its independent social motion, should never allow itself to be turned back toward electoral politics. Surely the individuals and small groups in the Guyana Teachers Union leading the confrontation are not their official leaders.
If the Guyana teachers and other toilers falls back intermittently, they can spring forward again and correct their mistakes. But those maintaining false principles will not help clarify things. The principle should be ‘don’t stop the strike.’ Let this social motion of labor be joined in solidarity by every sector of labor and the unemployed.
We are aware that there are Caribbean elders, who have been heroic or insightful in past struggles, who know every tradition of the labor movement from above and below. The editorial policy of Clash! is to clarify these distinctions early and often. We believe Guyana and Caribbean workers are politically mature enough to have the conversations today as they show they wish to be self-directed today and tomorrow. We will not protect ‘the nation,’ as governed by any party, from labor’s self-emancipation. That was one of the mistakes of the past among otherwise well-meaning people.
Scorn Those Who Rule Above
It is alright to pour scorn on those who rule, exploit and brutalize, and have pride that we refuse to be in their number. Whatever Bharrat Jagdeo says about the legitimacy of the former Guyana Teacher’s Union leader, Coretta McDonald, as also maintaining a position in parliament, the fact remains his malicious challenge is meant to legitimate elite representative government among labor mobilizing a confrontation.
Many will say ‘who is [Jagdeo] to tell our union leader what to do?’ The point is the rank-and-file of Guyana’s Teacher’s Union should be concerned about those who identify with power above society. Now whether McDonald is the former president, and Mark Lyte is the current president (who also previously was a member of parliament), or it is somebody else, how many people who have been elected to parliament are going to tell labour what it is to be ‘non-political?’
Clearly those who chat under urban street lamps, at the bottom house, at the community well, and in the doorway of rural store fronts, are ready to discard many personalities above them. The question is how to do it?
Remember Wildcat Strikes, When Official Trade Unions Say Strike is Over
This is why historically going back to original dues checkoff agreements we see there were also what were called ‘wildcat strikes.’ Independent labor action not approved by the official union or management.
This is another option that Caribbean labor has at its disposal. The Guyana Teachers Union has this in its arsenal of options, no matter what McDonald or Lyte and their circle officially decide. Historically, some of the most militant Caribbean workers concluded it would be best if they collected their own dues and made political decisions what to do with them. When relatively small affinity groups do this, whether we really grasp it or not, it is such squadrons that make the labor movement uncompromising.
Whether people can afford to pay the dues or not, those who have collected can decide who urgently needs care and consideration. In Jamaica in 1968 a famous wildcat strike of meatpackers decided, after spirited debate, to independently gather their dues to help a single mother among them. Equal to who they decided to help among ordinary toilers, is the quality of the political discussion and decision-making they had. By this means other things were decided such as ignoring the bosses of both unions and management.
We are agnostic on the dues checkoff question. If it helps mobilize independent and militant Guyana and Caribbean labor than it is a good thing. If it is taken away, there are many methods to sustain the confrontation with state and capital. Those who wish to defend dues checkoff must show they wish to defend independent labor action and not just the apparatus of trade union officialdom as labor itself. We will not defend dues checkoff to legitimate mediocre Guyana and Caribbean labor officialdom. We also will not give credit to trade union leaders above society for the self-mobilization of toilers below them.
Beyond Consensus of the Commoners and those who Conquer
The dues checkoff is part of labor laws and trade union officialdom’s logic that says when workers want higher wages this is NOT political. This is consistent with the premise that certain civil rights and human rights are agreed to between ruling classes and those they have conquered and should not be violated. How has this been working out for Guyana and the Caribbean?
All labor action is political. It can have good politics or bad politics. It can collaborate with the rulers or seek to discard them. But one thing we don’t need is an agreement with the emperors of capital that certain things are not political.
As cultivators of the popular will, it is unprincipled to say nothing about independent labor action, only to break out whistles and vuvuzelas when the workers move. And yet many, including the trade union officialdom, think of politics in this way. Every mobilization of ordinary people is either an end in itself — where we wish the democratic majority to directly govern — or we see it as yet another opportunity for elites to grab for power above society. Our allegiances are clear.
