By Nazim Baksh

IN 2005, my employer, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “locked out” members of the Canadian Media Guild, a union representing 5,500 employees. The employer, a legally-constituted corporate entity and an asset of the Canadian government, had the freedom and perhaps the right to deny employment for whatever reasons it believed to be legitimate. I believed, then, as I do now, that the employer was unjust in locking its employees out of their jobs.

Our only option was to walk the picket line for six long weeks. We never received a blind cent from the CBC. Instead, The Guild dipped into its reserves to pay us just enough to cover our grocery bills.

The CBC agreement with the union to deduct dues from our paychecks on the latter’s behalf was an act of courtesy that ended when there was no paycheck to deduct dues from. When a new collective agreement was finally negotiated, our employers paid its employees a tiny bonus as a show of goodwill.

This brings me to the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) case against the Ministry of Education, and the startling ruling of Justice Sandil Kissoon of Guyana’s High Court on Friday, April 19. To understand why Justice Kissoon’s decision has left legal experts baffled, let’s revisit the application the union submitted to the court.

GTU filed an application seeking to establish their Constitutional right to enter into a collective agreement with their employer, i.e. the Government of Guyana. GTU wanted Justice Kissoon to order the government to uphold the country’s Constitution and negotiate a new Collective Agreement with the union. The government did not walk away from the negotiations; the union abruptly left the table and never returned.

I was in court the day that the GTU’s vice-president, Julian Cambridge took the stand. Cambridge repeatedly said he couldn’t remember important dates and key details of his union’s engagements with the Ministry of Education. To help jog Cambridge’s memory, Justice Kissoon ordered the ministry to hand over the minutes of meetings with the GTU. Not a single reporter asked the GTU why it didn’t have a record of its own minutes.

While on the stand, Cambridge insisted that substantial annual increases in teachers’ salaries under the PPPC’s administration was irrelevant because they fell outside the boundaries of the Collective Agreement. When asked about the total number of GTU’s demands, Cambridge said he didn’t know.

When asked whether the GTU had indeed made 41 demands to the Ministry of Education, Cambridge said he couldn’t remember. Darshan Ramdhani, attorney for the Ministry of Education, suggested to Cambridge that 30 of GTU’s demands were met and exceeded by the government, the union’s V.P. again said he did not know. Shockingly, Cambridge even denied that a vehicle he purchased under a government duty free concession for some teachers did not result in a financial benefit to him.

In the nearly four hours that Justice Kissoon took to get through his ruling, he heaped praise on Cambridge, and described him as a highly credible witness. On the other hand, Justice Kissoon found that the evidence provided by the Ministry of Education’s Chief Education Officer, Mr. Saddam Hussain, was not credible.

Justice Kissoon could have left it there, but he sternly rebuked Hussain, calling into question the untarnished reputation of an accomplished educator, a respected former school principal, a father, and an upstanding member of his community. Hussain quietly cast his gaze down to the creaky floor of the old courtroom as Justice Kissoon unleashed a barrage of unhealthy adjectives against him.

Reading from his handwritten notes scattered on a number of notepads, Justice Kissoon concluded that GTU members should have been paid while they staged a month-long strike. And, even more bizarre, the Justice also ruled that the government should have continued to deduct dues on behalf of the union from the unpaid salaries of teachers. Lest we forget, the deduction of dues is not a matter for courts to adjudicate. It is a favour that the Ministry of Education does for the union.

In 2019, the United Auto Workers (UAW) walked off the job in a strike against General Motors (GM) in the United States. The strike lasted for 40 days, and GM announced that it would continue providing healthcare benefits to its striking employees. The compensation was a gesture of goodwill during a period of intense labour dispute.

In 2018, thousands of Marriott Hotel workers in the United States went on strike. During the labour dispute, Marriott provided a limited amount of financial assistance to help striking employees cover their healthcare costs and other essential household expenses.

During the 2009 strike by workers at Vale’s Sudbury operations in Canada, the United Steelworkers Union negotiated a deal with the company to provide $160 per week in strike pay to each worker on the picket line. The pittance helped alleviate some of the financial burden on the striking workers and their families while negotiations were ongoing.

In all the cases from Canada and India that Justice Kissoon cited in formulating his decision, not a single one involved employers paying employees who had exercised their freedom to engage in strike action.

Nowhere, in any nation of the world, has there ever been a ruling like that of Justice Kissoon’s. The authors of Guyana’s Constitution never intended to strip one party to a dispute of its rights and freedoms, only to hand it over to the other side. And on the basis of this simple fact, the Caribbean Court of Justice will ultimately overturn Justice Kissoon’s decision.

By handing GTU what it didn’t ask for, Justice Kissoon’s ruling runs the risk of harming the People of Guyana by stymieing the tremendous efforts of their legitimately elected government to make Guyana prosperous by fostering a climate favourable to domestic and foreign investors.