THE EDITOR: With the general election drawing nearer, our trade union leaders are, as is typical, attempting to leverage the proverbial silly season to stake claims for wage increases the country simply cannot afford.

Here are a few facts: Natural gas accounts for nearly 85 per cent of TT’s export revenues. In the past ten years gas production has declined by more than a third. In other words, as a country we got about a 25 per cent pay cut.

Now consider this: More than half of the country’s revenue goes into transfers and subsidies, ie, money that is used to keep the price we pay for water, electricity, fuel, etc below the actual cost, and to keep alive our more than 35 loss-making state enterprises – CAL, the inter-island ferry service, TTT, National Quarries, Lake Asphalt, MTS, etc.

In the wake of all this one would expect consensus on the need for serious belt-tightening; not in TT. WIGUT, the union representing UWI lecturers, after having demanded a 24 per cent pay increase, has been threatening to boycott classes and/or withhold exam results.

NB UWI is heavily subsidised (ie, paid for) by Caribbean governments (taxpayers) and what is frightening is that the lecturers aren’t bright enough to recognise that any increase in the cost of higher education is going to be borne either by the students or by us (the taxpayers).

Next is Oilfields Workers' Trade Union (OWTU) president general Ancel Roget, who is now trying to stir up T&TEC workers, threatening the government (citizens) “that something big is going to happen.” Why, comrade Roget? It has no more money.

But the worst of the lot is Seamen and Waterfront Workers Trade Union (SWWTU) leader Michael Annisette, who is in a leadership battle for control of the union. His SWWTU recently held the business community and, by extension, the wider population to ransom by having port workers withdraw their services, thereby halting/delaying container processing on the Port of Port of Spain for weeks, costing the business community millions.

More than half of Trinidad’s cargo docks at the port, which by the way may be the only port in the world whose workers operate on an 8 am to 4 pm work schedule, notwithstanding the fact that the port operates 24/7.

Annisette claims to have a pre-2015 agreement with the prior People's Partnership government for a 12 per cent pay increase that the current administration refuses to honour.

First question: Why has it taken nine years for comrade Annisette to make this an issue?

Second: If the SWWTU does in fact have a (signed?) agreement, why has it not taken the port/government to court? The matter would be settled in a day.

Third: What are we missing here?

Our labour leaders are locked in a time warp, and today’s worker needs more than placards and protests. Instead of parroting Marxist verbiage and antagonistically shouting about the proverbial struggle, they should be seated in the boardroom to glean a full understanding of their respective organisation's commercial reality, and thereby be in the best pos