TAWU President Senator Chester Humphrey recalls the occasion three Cabinet Ministers ( M. Isaac, J. Whiteman and W. Dewsbury) led some 20 people to pelt down his house with rotten meat, that followed on the electricity strike.

The senator’s battlefield is never to play into the hands of provocateurs or police; what he did was to call for trade union support.

Within hours Dr. Mitchell had apologized on radio and the catholic Bishop had rung him to remind him that this was the season of goodwill (it was Xmas eve) and so please forgive.

“We have the innate, unalienable right to strike and shut down all services we represent but we have not used this power to mash up the state” he says.

Every class society is represented by a dictatorship, he continues, the relative strength of the classes will determine the type of dictatorship.

“We have a nascent burgeoning dictatorship now but the struggle of the trade union movement makes it able to defy any anti-worker laws of the state.”

So how has labor changed in the last 34 years?

“The leader of the 1951 proletarian revolution, in transforming the movement from its narrow historic economism to the wider platform of political class struggle, lost its sense of historic mission.”

Meaning, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when trade unions emerged as an organized instrument in the fight against class exploitation, the workers’ movement so realized that it had to broaden the struggle from the factory floor to a wider political struggle- it was now a struggle, not against individuals but against a class and against the state supporting that class.

“Hundreds of years later in the Caribbean where trade unions preceded political parties the workers were to quickly become conscious that economic struggles (the estate system) needed a wider approach to attack the planter-mercantile class which led to the formation of the Grenada United Labour Party (GULP)”

The 1951 struggle achieved several objectives, he says. It achieved recognition of trade unions and created space for increased pay to agro-proletarians.

It created the political demand for adult suffrage: Before, the vote was given based on prosperity and the attendant bureaucrats of property meaning that an all powerful class could determine electoral outcome.

“Was this monopolism, Barnacle asked, similar to the 1979 Revo’s suspension of constitutional and electoral rights?”

(Senator Humphrey was prepared to debate that if there was a perception that you opposed the Revo your rights were likely to be taken away: the difference was that in 1979 the struggle was no longer on narrow economism).
One achievement of 1951; “it was the beginning of the end of institutional racism, people remember still when the first black man worked in a bank; people remember (albeit in a crude way) that “Uncle Gairy teach me to wear panty”.

This was the watershed date, marking the new dignity of the people- so much connotation to that “panty” praise.

But Chester Humphrey notes that the new class Gairy created and who would buy out the old mercantile class transformed the party- even Gairy himself became propertied, and the new economy spelled Gairy’s doom.

GULP was no longer the instrument of liberation came the seventies.

Grenada Maritime Manual Workers Union (GMMWU) had demised and been replaced by TAWU.

The historic years would be 1973-74 and the three- month strike when the Committee of 22 and New Jewel Movement (NJM) formed a popular political strike.

Perhaps January 21st was a better watershed date, when the GULP and the opposition fought a battle that do doubt was spontaneous by both parties’ lumpen elements.

What these dates illustrate is that the epicenter had shifted from the agro-proletariat to the urban workers; “the urban workers now became the engine of liberation and progress”.

In 1951 the forefront workers were from the estates, “but the objectives had deepened”

There had been an end to the political power of the merchant class and by 1974 the workers were prepared to shut down the country to defend against a new type of dictatorship.

The signs of dictatorship were:The Amendment Act of 2003 of the Labor Relations Act of 1999 that nobody in essential services could strike without being subject to a custodial sentence…

The Essential Services Act that had followed on the heels of the strike at GBN and the teachers strike but the workers had several times ignored the Act and government seemed afraid to implement its own law, Humphrey states.

“The workers’ movement has been able to influence major legislation: to reduce the Reconstruction Levy from 5% to 3%; to prevent government’s demand for 50% of the NIS sale of Cinnamon Hill property.

“So labor is more organized today and it is our duty to preserve democratic space and to give greater definition to it’s workers cannot allow the state to disintegrate to where corruption and the corrupt use of the state for the enrichment of a clique, to become the primary characteristic of the state”

He speaks of unexplained wealth of certain individuals come of whom were former revolutionaries, he speaks of the reckless sale of properties to the US and European wealthy.

“On our Independence Anniversary we need to preserve the issue of what independence means; Grenada for Grenadians.    

“We cannot give up our beach rights or our collective access to the beauty of our own country-we cannot therefore allow cottages around the lagoon without attempting to reclaim our common heritage.

“The workers movement in this context has no other choice, as part of the platform for change than to undertake the removal of the NNP Government from office.”