On June 19th, a strike of large proportions broke out in Trinidad, an island in British West Indies. Five thousand employees from the oilfields came out, following unsatisfied demands for a rise from 3½d. to 6d. an hour. Within a week the strike had spread as far as the island of Tobago. Warehouse and customs porters, busmen, employees in sugar factories, paper pulp works and asphalt lakes, scavengers, domestic servants and stevedores, were among the many workers involved. Strikers patrolled Port of Spain, preventing shops from opening, so that, for practical purposes, the strike was general.
H.M.S. “Ajax” and H.M.S. “Exeter” were called in by the Governor, who felt that his local forces were unable to cope with the situation. Most probably it was felt—as in the 1918 strike— that the negro police would mutiny if asked to fire on the negro workers, who form the majority of industrial workers in Trinidad. In the meantime, able-bodied whites were conscripted as “specials.” Only little information is to hand, but it appears that during disturbances some forty have been killed and many injured, the overwhelming majority of casualties occurring among strikers.
On June 24th the Governor issued a communique stating that unrest was occasioned by increased cost of living, and asked strikers to resume work pending negotiations between representatives of employers and workers.
During Question time in the House, however, Mr. Ormsby Gore could give no assurance that organisations exist through which any but the oil-workers can express themselves or make representations. (See Parliamentary Report, The Times, June 29th, 1937.) The strikers have, however, returned to work a week after the issue of the communique, on the basis of the Governor’s promise, possibly influenced by propaganda leaflets dropped from aeroplanes, whose very presence constituted a threat on the lives of the strikers. It is worth noticing that, on June 28th, The Times reported that an Order in Council had been issued prohibiting picketing on pain of thirty days’ summary imprisonment.
It has been estimated that British syndicates have invested 40,000,000 dollars in the oilfields and the asphalt lakes, while the sugar plantations belong to absentee landlords and native white capitalists. Dividends paid by the oil companies have been very high. Apex (Trinidad) Oil Co., Ltd., paid 35 per cent. last year and 27½ per cent. the year before. It was from this field that workers came out first. Trinidad Leaseholds, Ltd., a company owning subsidiaries throughout Trinidad, paid 25 per cent. in the year 1935-6.
Against this we find that wages are so low as scarcely to maintain life; skilled labourers earn from 17s. 6d. to £2 10s. 0d. a week, unskilled about 10s. 6d. a week with free quarters.
The Olivier Commission (1929) reported conditions of utmost squalor and deprivation, and called attention to the unsatisfactory state of factories from the point of view of health and safety of the workers. The Times (July 1st, 1930) reported that the Bishops of the West Indies presented a resolution to the Secretary of State supporting the Olivier Commission, and asked that something should be done “in view of the extreme gravity of the situation.” If the Christian Church is appalled by the workers' conditions, one can imagine them to be exceptionally bad.
Housing conditions are also bad. In the rural districts wage earners occupy mud huts, with no kind of sanitation. In towns, workers live in barracks—many belonging to the company employing them. Only Port of Spain has a sewerage system.
It was therefore to be expected that the exploitation of workers in Trinidad would eventually lead to a demonstration of discontent. Two features of the strike are encouraging: The first, that, in spite of warships and repressive measures, the strikers were not frightened back into work before establishing the fact that their grievances are serious. The second, that solidarity has been shown to exist between the negro-urban workers and East-Indian rural workers, who are largely exploited by the negro petty-bourgeois and the resident white capitalist.
K. D.
No comments:
Post a Comment