DIANA MAHABIR-WYATT

Do you notice how your memory of significant political issues is often linked to events in your own life?

The announcement by Public Utilities Minister Marvin Gonzales last Saturday, that the installation of a new geostationary operational environmental satellite by the TT Meteorological Service would increase the ability to detect Sahara dust movements and prepare for incoming droughts, made me "stand in my shoes and wonder" as our grandmothers used to say. Droughts?

I lived in Cascade when my children were born. The minister mentioned drought. No water? For example, WASA lock off water? Water gone for two weeks at a time? Children still in cloth diapers?

Then I started to wonder about Sahara dust greying the skies. Did it happen back then? Or even 30, 40 or 50 years ago?

I don’t recall that happening. And with a neighbour’s child with asthma, we were responsible for a dust-free house.

During the dry season, we dusted on Tuesdays and Fridays. During the rainy season, it was Friday only.

Now it is necessary as soon as Sahara dust shows up.

But it is not just Sahara dust that is new. A neighbour commenting that her younger sister was in the hospital with cancer, remarked in bewilderment that young people seem to be getting cancer “all the time” now. She didn’t remember in her childhood that happening. She is 56.

I started to think back to what industrial disputes were like 50 years ago.

Minister Gonzales recalled a situation when the country nearly shut down after weather forecasters were unavailable to work. I don’t remember that happening.

But he would know because even back then you could get away with that in the public service. Tolerance was paramount.

Not being "available for work" in the private sector without applying for permission, might result in not having a job available for you to come back to.

We were always available to work, even after playing mas both days, plus J'Ouvert, feet were so swollen you had to wear wachekongs or flip-flops to work on Ash Wednesday. It was a matter of honour.

Nobody actually said so, but in the 70s and 80s, employers took the discipline, production and tolerance motto seriously. Especially the discipline and production part, but then, as now, tolerance prevailed in taking disciplinary action in the public sector.

But in the industrial relations field, practitioners began to research what the courts and tribunals in sister isles were thinking, even before the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) was established and were still heavily influenced by UK jurisprudence.

Some of the principles and practices of good industrial relations however emerged between 1956 when the Federation of the West Indies collapsed (I wept real tears when that happened) and when the CCJ was established in 2021.

Industrial relations practitioners, based on similarities in the common-law fundamentals on which our jurisprudences are based, respected their awards and referenced them in their own local cases. For example, in the Bahamas in 2023, a new m