Instead of getting closer to each other, the island's two largest trade unions appear to be drifting further apart. At least this is what the language they use when they speak of each other suggests. When, just over two years ago, new steps were taken to set the ball rolling for the setting up of a trades union council, The Times had expressed a degree of scepticism, remarking that it had not been the fist time that moves in that direction had been taken. Yet, it believed that the trade unions meant business.

The situation since then appears to have worsened, with the two trade unions sniping at each other every time a serious dispute, or friction, crops up. When the general secretary of the Union Haddiema Maghqudin was asked in an interview with The Times if the setting up of a trades union council was still a dream, the reply was: "The TUC can only be set up if the GWU gives a clear signal that it really wants it to be set up. But they cannot keep using their newspaper to attack the UHM and expect us to work with them within a TUC".

The signal which that statement transmits is that the two unions are poles apart. One underlying cause of much of the distrust must obviously lie in their competition for members. Over the years, the GWU must have obviously seen the UHM as a threat as it grew from a small union, catering only for clerical workers in the government service, to a general workers' union.

As it celebrates its 40th anniversary, the UHM knows that with the changes that are taking place in the structure of the economy, it stands a better chance of attracting new members to its fold than the GWU, which is perceived (wrongly, of course) solely as an industrial workers' union. The fight for membership ought to be based on credibility and on the skills of trade union officials in negotiating the best terms for members without upsetting the applecart.

The Labour Party leader was not doing a good deed to the GWU when he recently gave the impression that the GWU would be given a privileged treatment when his party is in power. He now says he was misquoted as he never said the GWU was a privileged partner to the MLP. He points out that what he had said was that the GWU had been, and would remain, the privileged partner of the leftist movement. And what does this, pray, exactly mean?!

Time and again the majority of the workers have shown they do not want their unions to have anything to do with any of the political parties. They want the past to be forgotten, not to be exhumed in the shape of such declarations as that made by the Labour leader.

The GWU must be fully aware of this too as even its own members had in one of its surveys felt the need for their union to project an image that was independent of political parties. As against this, the UHM is perceived to be pro-government, but it has never entered into any statutory arrangements with a political party, as the GWU had done, and one of its first serious confrontations after its setting up was with a Nationalist government.

When The Times commented on the new step taken for the setting up of a TUC two years ago, it said this was almost too good to be true. Regretfully, time has proved it right. The unions had then stumbled in their own feet.

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