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The withdrawal of the trade union movement en masse from the National Tripartite Advisory Council (NTAC) all but ensures that the work of the council will become meaningless.
The Joint Trade Union Movement, the National Trade Union Centre and the Federation of Independent Trade Unions announced on Wednesday that they are withdrawing from NTAC because of what NATUC vice-president James Lambert described as "the disrespect we have experienced from the government of TT."
NTAC was launched in March 2016 to facilitate "tripartite engagement, dialogue and consultation" according to the Ministry of Labour's website. Members of the council represent the interests of the Government, the private sector and labour.
The collapse of the council comes at a particularly problematic time for negotiations between the government and labour, as the Minister of Finance has signalled challenges that he feared would follow payments due on a collective agreement between the Public Services Association and the National Insurance Board.
If that agreement were implemented across the public sector, Mr Imbert warned, it would increase the sector's wage bill by $7 billion.
PSA president Watson Duke suggests the agreement was between 2014 and 2016. But the economy of 2021 is not enjoying the buoyancy of just seven years ago.
To meet its substantial wage bills, the Government has already borrowed $3 billion and withdrawn $2 billion from the Heritage and Stabilisation Fund to pay public servants and meet the costs of establishing and managing the parallel health sector required to manage the covid19 pandemic.
Meaningful conversations and sensible collaborations between government, labour and the private sector are the most useful approach to meeting the challenges that have sandwiched the state between its financial obligations and a shrinking economic reality.
The NTAC was where those discussions were supposed to happen. But the intent of the council does not appear to have materialised in practice – or will shortly cease to do so.
Instead, trade unions have not only given up on the high-level negotiations that NTAC was supposed to enable, but beyond that, appear to feel insulted by their treatment there.
This apparently came as a surprise to Planning Minister Camille Robinson-Regis, who urged the unions to rejoin.
But NTAC government representative and former union leader and labour minister Jennifer Baptiste-Primus said on Wednesday that this was the second time the unions had quit the council. The first time, she was in Cabinet and persuaded them to stay. Mrs Baptiste-Primus hopes for "a cooling-off period" and a return to discussion, the alternative being an increasingly fractious industrial-relations climate.
Any hope for a successful restart of the economy will depend on the unified efforts of all stakeholders: government, private sector and labour.
Without an effective NTAC collaboration, that work will be exponentially harder.
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