From across the seas in Geneva, where he is attending the 102nd International Labour Conference, Labour Minister Errol McLeod was able to join his comrades at Labour Day in Fyzabad in observing a minute’s silence for late trade union veteran, Thelma Williams. The observance was made possible by the T&T Guardian, while conducting a telephone interview with McLeod during a live radio broadcast of the Labour Day rally.
Banking and General Workers president Vincent Cabrera was paying tribute to Williams, who died last Friday at the Mt Paran Home For The Aged, La Romaine, at the age of 93. He called for a minute’s silence and McLeod, on the other end of the line, thousands of miles away, joined in. “I consider Thelma Williams as the matriarch of the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) and by extension, one might say, of the labour movement of the country,” McLeod said. “To me, she was like a second mother and I know that she is gone to a better place. For the past couple of years she had been ailing and hers is a spirit that would live on in the labour movement. I extend again, deepest condolences to all whom she would have come into contact with her, to her immediate family and her extended family, and in the OWTU and the labour movement.”
McLeod said he deeply regretted not being able to attend Williams’ funeral on Friday, as he is due to return over the weekend, but he has instructed his ministry to have someone represent him. The funeral service will take place at OWTU Paramount Building followed by burial at Roodal (Broadway) Public Cemetery, Lady Hailes Avenue, San Fernando. McLeod’s successor in the OWTU, president general Ancel Roget, also paid tribute the OWTU’s first general secretary Ethelbert Redvers Blades, who died last November at the age of 110. “Sister Thelma was a mother, not only to the OWTU, but to the entire labour movement. On this Labour Day 2013, we recognise these outstanding heroes, who along with other great national heroes, laid the foundation for the birth and development of the OWTU and by extension, modern trade unionism,” Roget said. The Joint Trade Union Movement which organised the celebration, banned all politicians from appearing on their platform.
McLeod, who has fallen out with his comrades in the labour-based political party, Movement for Social Justice (MSJ), was not invited to the celebrations. However, he told the T&T Guardian: “I could not have been in Trinidad and not be in Fyzabad on this day, notwithstanding all that might have been said before. “Trinidad and Tobago is now on the governing body of the Geneva conference, so it was necessary, apart from attending the annual conference, that I be here for the deliberations of the governing body. So that is why I am not in Fyzabad.”