Perhaps with the intention of facilitating the call by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. David Granger, for the establishment of a social contract in Guyana, last week I participated in a symposium organised by the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) on the nature and possibilities of constructing such a contract in Guyana.

The GTUC envisaged an arrangement based upon the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 144 concerning Tripartite Consultations passed in 1976 to promote the implementation of international labour standards and encourage national consensus with regard to its work. The agreement is to be negotiated between the parties, but from the GTUC standpoint, the major objectives should be the realisation of a stable rate of exchange; the maintenance of a stable industrial climate; the restructuring of the economy; the reduction of social disparities through increased employment; national commitment to increased productivity; the reduction of unemployment levels; achieving a balance between prices and incomes; consolidation of the process of tripartite consultation, and continually reducing crime levels.

On the face of it, it is difficult to fault these kinds of cooperative arrangements consisting of the major social partners, but it is best to initially recognise that they only come into being and persist where governments of the day are confronted by major socio/economic problems and are very much part of their initiation. And this only ever occurs where the other social partners are sufficiently strong to severely obstruct the necessary changes and jeopardise the existence of the government itself.

Thus, as an insight to those set upon the establishment of this kind of arrangement, I began my presentation at the symposium by reference to one of the first explanations of the origins of social contracts provided, some 2400 years ago, in Plato’s Republic. It is also a story that is suggestive of the conditions that must prevail if such agreements are to be established and succeed. In what follows, the character Glaucon presents an account of justice that he wishes the wise Socrates to refute.

“They say that to do wrong is naturally good and to be wronged is bad, but the suffering of injury so far exceeds in badness the good of inflicting it that when they have done wrong to each other and suffered it, and have had a taste of both, those who are unable to avoid the latter and practice the former decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to inflict injury nor to suffer it. As a result they begin to make laws and covenants, and what the laws command they call lawful and just. This, they say, is the origin and essence of justice; it stands between the best and the worst, the best being to do wrong without paying the penalty and the worst to be wronged without the power of revenge. The just then is a mean between two extremes; it is welcomed and honoured because of men’s lack of power to do wrong. The man who has that power, the real man, would not make a compact with anyone not to inflict injury or suffer it. For him that would be madness. This then, Socrates, is the nature and origin of justice.”

In other words justice is not our preferred condition: it is an accommodation brought about because we do not have the power to prevent others from harming us as we do wrong to them. An implication is that if one was all powerful one would care nothing for laws and notions of justice: it is only the capacity of others to put a stop to us that prevents our marauding. Indeed, this position of Glaucon also indicates that successful free-riding (breaking the law or being unjust, if it is to your advantage and you can get away with it) is part and parcel of human behaviour and historical events have substantiated this position.

Emperors, popes, kings and all have only stopped their pillaging and come to heel when confronted by their competitors, and the democracy in which we take so much pride today only came into existence when the people themselves (e.g. the French and American revolutions) prevailed.

Even the ILO and its tripartite organisational structure consisting of government, employers and workers representatives came into existence in the context of widespread labour unrest in the developed world. Two years before its formation in 1919, the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Czar and grabbed power in Russia and similar workers’ revolutions appeared imminent. Indeed, many believed that the success of the Bolshevik adventure would stand or fall on the materialisation of such revolutions in the more developed countries. Socialism in one country, particularly such an underdeveloped one as Russia, was not considered a real possibility by many. Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen may have long recognised the need for an international labour organisation but the ILO was invented partly to dampen support for communism in Western Europe.

Perhaps the best known of the current social partnership agreements is that which exists in the Irish Republic. Here again, the grave socio/economic conditions that existed in that country in about 1987 forced the government to call upon the social partners to cooperate and  agree upon a programme to regenerate the economy and improve social equality. That and subsequent agreements have been credited with significantly contributing to the transformation of Irish society and the economy. Indeed, in terms of pages, the present Irish programme “Towards 2016: Ten-Year Framework Social Partnership Agreement 2006-2015” is some five times the size of the initial one.

In our region the best known successful effort at establishing a social partnership is to be found in Barbados and the story is similar. In the early 1990s that country was experiencing rapidly declining foreign exchange reserves, a worsening balance of payments position, dramatic rises in unemployment and a high fiscal deficit.

The government was in a quandary and so agreed in 1993 with the employers and trade union representatives to the establishment of a Prices and Incomes Protocol, which initiated social partnership agreements that still exist.

The kind of social partnership agreement that is now being proposed is much more limited in scope than the traditional hypothetical social contracts that based our political obligations in the brutishness of existence in a “state of nature.” However, it can only be successfully established and sustained in a transparent political environment and thus, the Glauconian notion that justice and right are rooted in power relations is as pertinent as ever for those seeking to establish and sustain social partnership agreements in Guyana.

henryjeffrey@yahoo.com