THE USE OF STATE VIOLENCE AND THE LAW AGAINST STRIKES AND MASS REVOLTS IN ANTIGUA PART ONE

BY ALVETTE ELLORTON JEFFERS

The most medieval and barbaric forms of State violence, except for capital punishment, which is still legal, whittled over time and ended with the abolition of slavery in 1834. However, the plantocracy and the State it evolved, continued to regulate black lives for the benefit of the small, white population. During moments of labor disputes and social uprisings against blatant forms of exploitation, coercion, physical abuse and poverty, the security forces continued to use violence, as it did during slavery, to suppress those efforts for change. Whenever the police seemed inadequate for its task, the State solicited help from British soldiers.

In 1918, the Police and the Defense Force which comprised of white planters, shot directly at several hundred protesters, some of whom threw stones at them. Seventeen suffered injuries and two were killed. Twenty people, including women, were charged with participating in the riot. Twelve were found guilty and sentenced to prison to perform hard labor. (Race, Class and ‘Moral Economy’ by Glen Richards).

The 1918 revolt had its beginnings in a dispute between cane cutters and the Planters ’ Association. The cane cutters were demanding that their wages should continue to be based upon the row of canes cut and not by the ton, which the planters were implementing. The Planters Association’s rigidity and the cane cutters insistence on their demand, engendered a volatile situation. It became more incendiary when the estate owners encouraged strike breaking and the police arrested and prosecuted striking workers for violating the Contract Act. The Contract Act “denied them any right to march, picket or strike in protest or even to set up any form of representative organization.” (Dyde, p. 215) The alternative forms of struggle left available to cane cutters and their sympathizers included but were not limited to putting fire to cane fields. These actions reflected the workers’ hostility to the prevailing legal restrictions and labor conditions that locked them in an oppressive and exploitative socio-economic system.

Susan Lowes states in her Thesis, The Peculiar Class , that “cane fires" were “a time-honored method used by estate workers to display dissatisfaction.” (pp. 273-274) It wasn't just that. The workers burnt cane fields to indicate that they could temporarily halt the reaping of the canes and the production of sugar. The fires affected the planters’ profit margins and they wanted the fires stopped.

A manager of one of the burnt sugar cane fields, informed the police that George Weston, Joseph Collins and John Furlong facilitated the burning of the cane fields and also obstructed the reaping of the canes. Acting on the manager’s information the police, on the 9^th of March 1918, sought the arrest of the three men but were prohibited and missiles were thrown at them.

Later that same day, the Riot Act was read but the people from Point and the surrounding areas remained openly defiant. They flouted the authority of the Colonial State. In their attempt to restore law and order, the police and the armed, white planers killed John Furlong and James Brown. Others were maimed. The riots, the burning of cane fields and the strikes were the tools the workers adopted to show that they were not completely powerless, despite the denial of the right to self-organize. Their “illegal” industrial actions challenged the power of the planter class, whose power resided in their ability to decide the economic fate of workers because they had control over land, employment and wages.

The call for law and order is an appeal to the State to preserve the relations of power that undergird the division and exploitation of labor. Whenever it appears those power relationships could be upended by a rebellious mass, the State turns to the old methods of control or invent new ones to stem the rebellious tide. 1951 was such a moment.

That year began with a bang. On January 3rd , waterfront workers participated in a wildcat strike for call pay. It lasted for two days. On February 26th , cotton pickers on Weatherhills estate struck. They decided they would only return to work after the AT&LU was recognized as their bargaining agent. Late April, sugar curers at the sugar factory decided, among themselves, not to clean the mixers. They were suspended without pay on the 29 th of April. In this charged, industrial atmosphere workers ceased working to join the celebration of international workers’ day on May 1st . May 1st was not then an official holiday. Nevertheless, the AT&LU and the working class made it so.

The owners of the sugar factory retaliated and closed operation until the 4th of May. They expected the workers to return to work the day after without renumeration for the days they were locked out by the company. The factory workers refused to return to work while the sugar curers remained suspended. On the 5th of May, the AT&LU requested reinstatement of the sugar curers. Instead, the Employers Federation, accused the AT&LU of causing economic mayhem and it informed the union on the 8 th of May that it would no longer recognize it. 3 The union informed the Federation that it would do all that was necessary to protect the union. On the10th of May, the AT&LU called a general strike. Every sector of the economy was impacted by the two weeks strike. The union organized committees of workers to reinforce the strike. Police arrested a number of strike enforcers, and after their trial a few ended up in prison. (Dyde, pp. 244-245 & Struggle and Conquest by N. Richards, pp. 39-42)

To affect a dampening of the confrontation between workers and capital, Governor Blackburn expressed his desire for a cessation of strikes and the Employers Federation called for the reestablishment of law and order. The AT&LU reaffirmed its position that strikes were indispensable to settling conflicts between workers and the owners of industry. Its position on “law and order” was equally unambiguous which, to this day, remains instructive. “Slave masters” it said, “never had justice in mind. It was order they wanted, not justice and their order meant bringing in soldiers. Justice, not law and order, would solve workers’ grievances.” (Smith, p.102)

On the 14th of June the Governor, acting on the advice from the police, got the Welsh Fusiliers, a regiment of the British army, to occupy St John’s. Close to the time of the arrival of the Army, The Public Meeting and Procession Ordinance was enacted. The Ordinance prohibited meetings in public spaces, the carrying of lighted torches, the use of noisy instruments and the carrying of weapons. (Smith: p. 101) The presence of the soldiers, the mobilization of the police, the passage of the Ordinance and the state of emergency, were all arranged to suppress mass demonstrations. More specifically, these preemptive measures were put in place to prevent the escalation of the class conflict between the workers and employers of labor before it reached the point where it could imperil the whole economic structure and British, colonial rule.

The governor wanted stability. An agreement between the AT&LU and Employers Federation (EF) to the creation of an investigative body could prevent his use of force. It could also help to cement the Governor’s control over the industrial dispute and, through it, reinforce the primacy of the State’s authority in industrial matters. Both the AT&LU and EF consented to the Enquiry. The Malone Enquiry was setup and began hearings on June 14th . It made its recommendations on 8 th of August 1951 which settled the industrial dispute in a way that was acceptable to the AT&LU and unsatisfactory to the Employers Federation for the reason that the ability to strike remained protected. The restoration of law and order was achieved through the threat of military violence, the temporary ban on democratic expressions and the superimposition of the State over the industrial process.

Over the next couple of years, the Governor periodically graduated the AT&LU leadership until it became fully responsible for Antigua and Barbuda’s internal affairs in 1967. VC Bird and his trade union government settled into office and intensified the diversification of the economy.In 1965, Sir Arthur Lewis stated that the AT&LU government “has worked an economic miracle in Antigua, developing the tourist trade,” building “an oil refinery…and a deep-water harbour.” He wrote that Bird “sees Antigua as on the verge of self-sufficiency and is in no mood to be dictated to. ” ( Dyde, p.250)

How did a government which had received such praise for its handling of the economy, come to fall so precipitously from grace in such a short of period time after its ascension to office? VC Bird had cultivated a paternalistic relationship with sugar and agricultural workers, but it did not have a similar appeal to school leavers and workers in the service economy and oil industry. Among waterfront workers, paternalism was too tenuous an ideology to guarantee any long term, political relationships with this sector of the working class that had its consciousness formed in the struggle for trade union rights and conflicts with different colonial authorities dating back to the 19^th century.

In The Growth Of The Modern West Indies, Gordon K Lewis, states the following: “…on a general level, there have been new stirrings of self- consciousness on the part of the Antigua masses, making themselves felt over the last twenty - five years, stirrings which, as Vere Bird has properly noted, have too often been dismissed as lawlessness and irresponsibility. (p.137) These were the types of workers with whom VC Bird was toying.

While governing, the AT&LU trade union government did not view as crucial, a participatory role for the working class in the reorganization of the economy. As leaders of the workers’ movement, the workers ’ participation was indispensable, not just for the formation of the union but its development and defense. As government, they manifested a contrary attitude.

Economic development was strictly a partnership between the government, its advisors and foreign investors. As the relationship between government and foreign capital deepened, the political space increased between itself and the working class, and the less the government came to know about the workers it was purportedly representing. The union was expected to fill the void. There was the expectation that it would help to foster a non-antagonistic, industrial climate by suppressing any expression that suggested that the workers believed they had agency.

Even if the union officers wanted to alter the “consciousness” of the workers to suit the economic and political objectives of the AT&LU government or still their “stirrings,” the working conditions within the old and new sectors of the economy and the workers’ dissatisfaction with their wages, made that goal difficult to attain. This was compounded by the fact that the government became complacent “as they settle down into their roles of administrative oligarchs dependent, increasingly, on the American investment and the class of rapacious” capitalists who manifested a “new acquisitive instincts, new predatory social attitudes” and were anti-union too. (Gordon Lewis, p. 141)

The combination of government’s indifference to workers’ demands, their relegation to the bleachers of daily politics from where the workers observed the government performing its alliance and dalliance with the new capitalist class, were sufficient to sustain and invigorate the workers’ “stirrings” and “self -consciousness.”