Used with intelligence and based on intelligence, there is no doubt that roadblocks are an effective means of policing in a T&T context, especially given the country’s reliance on the automobile as a means of personal transport.
But there is also no doubt that Monday’s roadblocks throughout the country, which were timed to coincide with thousands of people going to work, school, appointments etc were not meant to advance the fight against criminals. They were meant to pressure Government to improve the wage offer made by the Chief Personnel Officer, Stephanie Lewis, to the country’s police officers. Rather than being a tool of policing, the roadblocks were used as a tool of industrial relations negotiations.
Were police justified?
For most people, the answer to that question would be unequivocally no. If Government allows the instigators of Monday’s national roadblock to escape unscathed, it is setting the country up for firemen to ignore burning buildings or homes, prison officers to leave T&T’s prisons unmanned, soldiers and coastguardsmen to fail to apprehend external threats and doctors and nurses not treating people in casualty wards. This is not to mention the untold damage done to the nation’s school children when teachers fail to turn up for work.
Left unchecked, the roadblocks may also be setting the country up for T&TEC crews failing to respond to electricity outages, WASA turncocks not returning water to communities on scheduled service, T&T air traffic controllers allowing anarchy to reign in the skies above this country and NP trucks failing to replenish gas stations.
In short, workers at any so-called essential service may seek to go nuclear in their response to negotiations for a new collective agreement or new contract terms that are not going in their favour, when a return to the bargaining table with new proposals would be a more appropriate course of action
The real damage of Monday’s action by the police, then, is that of moral hazard; in that if the perpetrators of the national roadblock are not perceived to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds, T&T’s firemen, prison officers, soldiers and doctors/nurses are likely to believe that they can impose distress on others without consequence in furtherance of wage demands.
But, in a real sense, the Government may have brought Monday’s calamity on the country by its clumsy handling of the public service wage negotiations.
By that statement is meant that having agreed in March 2015 to pay the 25,000 or so civil servants a 14 per cent wage increase for the years 2011 to 2013—and agreed in December 2014 to pay the 12,000 teachers the same amount for the period October 1, 2011 to September 30, 2014—it should have been clear to the Government’s negotiators that other workers in the public service (broadly defined) such as police officers, firemen and prison officials would have looked to the CPO for a similar wage increase.
In the Sunday BG of March 15, in a commentary headlined “Can T&T afford 14% for public servants,” under the sub-headline Salary Precedent, I wrote: “How can the Minister of Finance justify increasing the salaries of 25,000 public servants by 14 per cent and not increasing the wage packages of police officers, prison officers, fire officers and members of the army coast guard and air guard by a similar amount.
“For the CPO to not offer other workers in the public sector 14 per cent would be discriminatory and “oppressive, unfairly prejudicial or unfairly disregarding their interests or their representatives interests, to quote the words of the Telecommunications Authority of T&T in its statement on the proposed acquisition of Columbus International by Cable & Wireless Communications.”
In a speech at a breakfast meeting of the Chaguanas Chamber of Industry and Commerce the theme of which was Achieving Financial Stability, Finance Minister Larry Howai responded directly to my suggestion that the 14 per cent for civil servants (and teachers) would have served as a benchmark for other workers in the public service, when he said: “On the issue of the public sector wage negotiations, our goal is to have these settled without significant dislocation of the local economy.
“With respect to the recent civil service agreement, the entire increase is just about half of one percent of the budget and we have identified funding coming from unbudgeted repayments of loans coming in to Government and unbudgeted dividend payments which will allow Government to pay the outstanding commitment of backpay without negatively affecting our cash balances.
“This does not mean that all agreements can or should be settled at the same levels. The settlement figures will be contingent on a number of factors including, inter alia, the future trajectory of energy prices, the ability of the entity to pay and salary levels prevailing within the entity as compared with comparator organisations.”
In this excerpt of his speech, Mr Howai put forward three factors to explain why salary increases offered to the police service, the fire service, the prison service and the Defence Force may not be as rich as those offered to civil servants:
Future trajectory of energy prices
This surely does not apply to negotiations that took place at the same time as the negotiations with civil servants and teachers. In other words, if the CPO is negotiating with police, prisons and fire officers at the same time as with civil servants and teachers, on what basis is the CPO saying that the civil servants and teachers are entitled to a larger wage increase than the other public servants (broadly defined)?
How does the future trajectory of energy prices affect the CPO’s negotiations with the police, fire and prisons when those negotiations were going on at the same time as the civil servants and teachers... with both sets of negotiations the latter negotiations being concluded at a time of depressed export prices and tax revenue? That argument is both specious and p and if either the Minister of Finance or the CPO are offended by that description, I invite them to counter it in this space:
The ability of the entity to pay
Since civil servants and teachers are paid by the Government just like the police, prisons, fire and similar categories of workers, there can be no distinction between the wage settlement offers. To argue otherwise would be to put forward the view that the Government is able to pay the increased wages and backpay of civil servants and teachers, but not of police officers, prison officers, fire officers and others.
It should have occurred to the CPO and the Minister of Finance that if the Government agreed to pay civil servants and teachers a 14 per cent wage increase and close to $2 billion backpay, it should only have done so knowing that it could afford to make a similar offers to the other categories of public servants. In other words, it should have been obvious to the CPO that the other categories of public servants would have demanded a comparable wage increases to that granted to the civil servants and teachers. In other words, the Government had a choice of reducing the offer to the civil servants and teachers to ensure equity to all public servants. The logic would then have been: We cannot afford to pay everyone 14 per cent, but we can afford to pay everyone 10 per cent, so let us offer the civil servants and teachers 10 per cent. But having offered the civil servants and teachers 14 per cent, how could police officers and prison officers be offered less? Specious argument.
Salaries at comparable organisations
As far as I am concerned, the appropriate comparison for one public servant is another public servant. The whole idea of attempting to compare teachers with “market” rates or market values seems strange to me when the appropriate comparator for a teacher with a police officer. If teachers are being paid based on what the market indicates, why is it different for police officers? Is there no market for comparable wages?