Lessons In Solidarity

The labour unrest of the past two weeks brought out the best and the worst in of us as we stood in solidarity with the East Indian workers whose united action and effective representation earned them the gains of improved wages and hopefully overall working conditions. I completely missed Week I but felt a mixture of shame and distress when someone called me in Jamaica to let me know what was happening at home. I was also angry because right up to the demonstration by the group of workers from the Dominican Republic I had been the soul of forgiveness. After that, I could not swallow any reason at all why the entire situation of contractual arrangements with migrant workers in Anguilla was not thoroughly investigated and addressed. My first response included an element of disbelief. That could not be happening in our “up market” Anguilla that is supposed to be doing so well. A tear or two escaped at news of wrigglers in drinking water and inadequate diets but that had to be exaggeration. In spite of cable television images, my associations with East Indians especially vegetarian Hindus is that they eat very well – healthy foods so I felt ashamed that in this little island to which they had come in search of a better life, hard working employees in Anguilla’s construction industry found it necessary to bring their plight to the attention of the Anguillian public and to the world.

Another emotion-filled moment was the sight of that long line of workers snaking its way to the Valley with an air of resolve that made me wonder if everyone else was also reflecting on that old adage, ‘unity is strength’. However, what also moved me was the fact that many Anguillians, my people who love to bad talk and ‘malice’ each other so, were showing the traditional value of kindness as well as the non-traditional value of worker solidarity as they looked on, drove by honking horns and giving other signs of solidarity to the walking workers. I had listened to the escapade in the west on Heartbeat Radio and if the accounts were accurate, I experienced real distress and repeatedly said to my listening partner, “Why don’t the police simply keep the peace by insisting that the workers walk in single file to the Valley and provide them with an escort?” I do not know what professional thoughts may have determined their mismanagement of the situation but from a common sense point of view, I was disappointed that discretion was not used by the police to keep the peace. After all, in the end, the workers were allowed to walk, accompanied by the police. I hope we bear in mind that violence begets violence and that if force and violence are used unnecessarily by authorities, then those authorities may not be qualified to guide the youths who resort to the use of violence for very similar reasons.

That scenario at its ugliest made me extremely proud of the crowd that obviously showed restraint in spite of the chaos surrounding the roadblock and the impasse that led to the release of one of the persons that the police had held. One Jamaican partner concurred, sharing the thought that in Jamaica, the police van would have been overturned and burned. I shudder to think of what may have happened to the officers but would advise our officers here to use their knowledge of the people and culture in difficult situations. As one former colleague often reminded me, ‘common sense ain’ common’. Some people feel that the Anguillian police are hiding behind non-Anguillian ones. I hope this is not true for if the police as a collective do not manage their operations well, the racial tensions that ever simmer just below the surface may overflow. I witnessed and was part of a similar display of discipline when the lawyers reported the results of one stage of the negotiation process and asked the Anguillians to reserve their opinions so as to allow the workers most affected to decide. Another proud moment.

Amidst the show of solidarity with the East Indian workers and more so because of the ‘today it’s them, tomorrow it may be us’ sentiments, all kinds of other agendas were being discussed among the Anguillians gathered across the road from the Post Office on Tuesday. Topics included the recurring call to bring down the government by one means or another. A motion of no confidence seemed to be the preferred mode but here and there the proposed solutions were more dramatic and violent. Here and there I heard mutterings about the Health Authority and hoped that situation would be speedily rectified. All the golf course venom came up again. It has not gone away. All the overdevelopment issues came up. They have increased, not gone away, though sadly, the watchdog aspect of the Anguilla National Trust has. I also could not help wondering what would have happened differently if my suggestion of importing Haitian workers had been taken. Another bit of the buzz surrounded the alleged Victor-Bunton spilt on which everyone in my immediate section of the crowd had inside information. The Chief Minister’s tone in his long-awaited “rapid” radio response added fuel to the fire. He sounded arrogant and his comments on the Anguillian-support made me think that he still had not got it. I think someone must have briefed the Chief Minister between his rapid radio response and the later, more studied and tempered response in the dwindling light outside his office. At that point the CM sounded like he was finally respecting the will of the people who knew exactly why they were standing in solidarity with the East Indians. Sorry Haydn, there are no West Indians. You are right about people of colour but I am not an Indian and neither are you. Columbus made a mistake. We were brought out of Africa. In all the talk, cross talk and more talk there was one glaring and somewhat frightening fact. No one seemed to think that a viable slate of new or even alternative leaders had emerged convincingly enough to make for revolutionary change. Are those brilliant lawyer ladies ready to forsake other pursuits to provide better representation for Anguilla people and in one fell swoop reverse the gender composition of the Anguilla House of Assembly? They are intelligent and experienced and relatively young. Right now I feel more confident in leadership imbued with youth. I respect the views of the man and woman on the street but all the plans for succession that I heard in my section of the crowd sounded quarter-baked.

All I can hope for now is that all workers, developers and would be developers, all political leaders and would be political leaders as well as those of us who supported the workers have learnt some lessons from power of organised and united action even in the face of that big shark known as globalization. What I think we must all demand and monitor and evaluate though, is systematic change – at the level of legislation and policy with a mechanism put in place to ensure that nothing like this ever happens in Anguilla again. We must establish the minimum wage as the challenges of doing that have been faced and surmounted by others. Anguilla can do it too. We must also pay particular attention to our negotiation skills and the composition of the negotiation team as the current arrangement does not seem to recognise the basic interests and aspirations of Anguillians. This is not acceptable for a Christian nation; not acceptable for a democracy even in a colony; not acceptable for the 21st century; not acceptable for people whose traditions are rooted in the humane and welcoming ethos of our African Motherland. Anguilla has probably not lost its national xenophobia but the intelligence factor is kicking in and I truly hope that increasingly we can discern when to play party politics from when to join the vanguard and secure some of the most precious values and principles still held by our people.