When the general secretary, George Walter, failed to align the demands, actions and thoughts of the workers with the government’s political directives, he and Donald Halsted were thrown out of the union in 1967. The dismissal of Keithlyn Smith, Malcolm Daniel and others followed soon after. The dismissed men first demanded their reinstatement and when the union government decided against it, they formed the Antigua Workers Union (AWU) on May 17th and registered it on May 31st, 1967. The VC Bird’s trade union government adamantly refused to recognize the AWU. 

The Employers Federation, which was formed in 1951 in opposition to the AT&LU, supported the government’s refusal to recognize the AWU. The government publicly encouraged the Federation in its obstruction of the workers’ effort to enroll in the AWU. When the Federation was formed, Bird viewed its formation “as a declaration of war against Antiguan workers”. (Dyde, p. 244) But between 1967-68, the AT&LU government allied itself with the same employers’ organization that it once treated as an enemy. AT&LU wanted the Federation’s help in stunting the AWU’s growth and the Federation wanted a subservient union. It was a remarkable turn of events. 

Nevertheless, the government’s obstructionism helped to nurture a more radicalized working class. What started out in 1967 as a demand for the right to belong to a trade union, broadened by 1968, to include the demand for the resignation of the government. All strikes and pickets that preceded the general strike of March 14th didn't secure AWU's recognition. Instead, the government became more belligerent. VC Bird should have realized by then that his government was no longer in control of the country. The working class was taking its directives from the leaders of the opposition parties and the AWU. Nothing moved unless they said so. VC Bird was in the same position in 1951. 

On March 14th, 1968, the AWU, the Antigua and Barbuda Democratic Movement (ABDM) and Antigua Progressive Movement (APM) called a general strike. By March 17th, workers from every sector of the economy were out on strike, except essential services. The economy came to a halt. On March 18th the Defense Force was called out. The government declared a state of emergency and a previous Amendment of the 1951 Public Meeting and Procession Ordinance empowered the Police to arrest protestors without a warrant. Like the 1951 Ordinance, its 1968 Amendment prohibited marches, public meetings, pickets and unlawful assembly. And just like the workers of 1918 and 1951, the workers of 1968 were in no mood to accept arbitrary rule. On the 19th of March, the working class ignored the state of emergency and took over the streets in defiance of the Police and Defense Force. The Riot Squad fired teargas directly at the crowd while the regular police rushed the protestors with batons in hand. They were pelted with bottles and stones. The Defense Force, like it did in 1918, shot at the protestors. They were given the orders to shoot to kill. 

According to Smith, the Minister of Social Services had on that day told the chief of police that “…the resistance to the police must be regarded as a rebellion against the legitimate government of the state. It must be put down with force. Shoot to kill. The order is already signed” (p.185). Fifty-eight people were wounded. (Dyde, p.266) That number far exceeded the seventeen who were wounded by the police and defense forces in 1918. By evening, the streets were cleared but the general strike continued into the following day, March 20th . 

VC Bird, who once rejected the idea that the “stirrings” and expression of workers’ “selfconsciousness” were expressions of “lawlessness and irresponsibility,” now deemed the working class uprising as an act of “lawlessness” and his government sanctioned the use of violence against them. Violence was used, not just to maim and induce fear, it was also intended to create doubt in the minds of the working class about their capacity to initiate fundamental changes. 

Bird did not know the workers he purportedly governed and this was  due to his total misconception of and alienation from them. That remains the case today for all the parties that assume to be leading the working class. The day after the police had beaten and teargassed workers and the Defense Force had injured many with live ammunition VC Bird, quite reluctantly, went to Government House. There he met with the opposition to tender the resignation of his government. It was the very first time in the history of the English, speaking Caribbean that a general strike, plus resistance to State violence had forced a government’s resignation. 

The Opposition, however, refused to accept Bird’s government’s offer of resignation. They settled instead for a bye election and a general election to be held later. That decision is still being debated. It is my humble opinion that George Walter and his closest allies refused the government’s resignation because they did not want to reinforce the important lesson, they thought the workers had learnt, that a mass movement could end the rule of an oppressive government through its use of the general strike and resistance to the armed wing of the State. The Opposition won both of the elections. George Walter, the former general secretary of the AWU, became Premier and with his Progressive Labour Movement (PLM) they proceeded to govern.

All the political parties, in Antigua and Barbuda, make a lot of noise about the absence or limits of democracy while in opposition. They do nothing to advance its ideas or its practices once they become the government but as much as they can to curtail its development. Their antidemocratic behavior has its antecedents in the island’s colonial history. CLR James makes this clear in Party Politics in the West Indies. “I have,” he writes, “repudiated in unambiguous terms the false and dangerous conception that we have been so educated by the British that the instinct for democracy is established among us...I see every sign that the tendency to naked power and naked brutality the result of West Indian historical development, is here all around us.” (p. 122) 

In a fashion not too dissimilar from the colonial regime, the black governments that followed them, settled into controlling the population, through legislation, arrests of their opponents, shackling the press and when necessary, by using the police and the defense force to beat up the working class. A few minutes of voting is considered to be the hallmark of democratic expression. With their Parliament majority, the politicians proceed to govern as an elected dictatorship, attempting to appease the population with whatever underfunded, welfare schemes they can contrive. One of the first acts of the PLM government was the amendment of the Newspaper Surety Act in 1971. The Amendment required newspapers to get a license from Cabinet to publish a newspaper. The paper had to pay an annual license fee and a deposit of $10,000 for a potential libel against the paper. 

Like the colonial and the VC Bird governments before it, the PLM government enacted its own version of a Public Order Act. Its Act of 1972 gave the police “powers to regulate marches, public meetings and public address systems. The Act also allowed the police to prohibit disturbances at public meetings and to carry out warrantless searches. (Smith, p. 227). 

Applications to the police for public meetings were sometimes denied. Police broke up and teargassed a demonstration called by the APL to oppose the Public 7 Order Act of 1972. The PLM’s amendment of 1972 amended the ALP’s 1968 amendment which itself was an amendment of Governor Blackburn’s 1951 Ordinance. All three were enacted to give the government the ability to regulate, repress and criminalize democratic activities and expressions. Months after the bill’s passage the Minister of Home Affairs, Donald Halsted, denied the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM) permission to hold its annual African Liberation Day march and rally in May of 1973. The event had prior approval from the police. ACLM defied the ban and marched. An estimated fourteen thousand people participated in the banned march and rally. Tim Hector and Eustace Newton were charged after but had their cases dismissed. Halstead went on to create his own secret police without any public ridicule from his party and government. 

His secret police evoked memories of Haiti’s Tonton Macoute. The Macoute was President Duvalier of Haiti secret police which he created in 1959 to disappear his opponents. There were no such disappearances in Antigua, but the regular police arrested members of the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM) for distributing a copy of Outlet which was printed and circulated in defiance of the requirements of the Newspaper Act. Members were occasionally arrested and detained on trumped up charges. The police shot at two members of ACLM in 1973 when they were putting up posters during the night. The posters were in support of striking, public utility workers who had turned to the Public Service Association (PSA) and ACLM for aid in their industrial conflict with PLM. One hundred of the workers were permanently fired and were denied reinstatement although the Court had deemed their dismissal illegal. The two ACLM members, Glenn (Allah) Samuel and Charlesworth Spencer, were able to escape the police by laying low in the dark, St. John’s public cemetery where they stayed until daybreak. 

PLM governed in a state of perpetual crises. Some were externally driven. Others were self-inflicted and both were exacerbated by bomb threats and actual explosions which the government linked to the ALP. The Arab/Israeli war in 1973 led to oil shortages and increases in the price for goods and services, including air fare. Tourist visits experienced a sharp decline resulting in the closure of some hotels. The oil refinery eventually stopped refining oil and workers lost their jobs. The PLM closed down the sugar industry in 1972 displacing an estimated nine hundred workers, some of whom protested but were outnumbered by a large and hostile crowd of PLM working class supporters who heckled them while they picketed the Administration building situated on lower High Street. LIAT collapsed and was eventually taken over by Caricom in 1975. 

According to Professor Paget Henry, the economic crisis caused unemployment to rise to 20.46 % and unutilized labour was at 26.73 percent. Unutilized labour “is the section of the population age fourteen and over that is not employed, underemployed or looking for work.” (Peripheral Capitalism, p. 136) The externally dependent economy was in a rut. PLM’s social security scheme and its increased investments in agricultural had marginal impact on the lives of the 47.19% who were affected the most by increases in food prices, the downturn in the service sector, closure of the sugar industry and depressed or suppressed wages. In the midst of high unemployment and economic instability, the PLM passed a Labor Code (Code) in 1975 which was restrictive, regulatory and auxiliary in nature. The Code regulates the industrial process and establishes minimum standards for things like overtime, sick leave, vacation pay etc. The Code also contains provisions that allow the government to prevent secondary boycotts and the general strike. They were the type of strikes that VC Bird sanctioned in 1951 and George Walter used in 1968 but opposed on both occasions by the Employers Federation. 

Nowadays, once a dispute between workers and employers in the private or essential services has been declared a major dispute, the PLM government enshrined in the Code all the necessary prerequisites to strangulate its development. A major dispute is one that the government can claim to be detrimental to the health and welfare of the country. (Code, Section K13) Gone are the days when workers could participate in a general strike that is work related. If it happens, it becomes a political strike because it would be in defiance of all the labor laws that are set up to nullify it. When a general strike and any related occurrences are placed outside the jurisdiction of the Code, the Public Order of 1972 exists to manage it. [Code, K20 (1)] By extension, any new democratic expressions or formations that are likely to emerge out of working class and everyday people’s struggles that would suggest the possibility of an alternative form of governance, those struggles could be violently set upon by the ruling elite through its use of the police and defense force. PLM lost the election of 1976 and left behind all the restrictive tools, including those of the colonial era necessary to contain a mass movement before it could resolve itself into a new organization of society.

Look out for Part Three