Pull Quote: “I enjoyed it, because for one thing, it was satisfying to me to help those workers who were unprotected, despite the fact that the law was there. Having laws on the books doesn’t mean you have protection, unless you can enforce those laws. The laws were there, but for a number of reasons, the employers held the sway and they used their influence.”
By Leon Suseran
Norman Eric Newton Semple has spent the best years of his life ensuring that employees across Berbice were protected from unscrupulous practices by their employers. He represented their issues and concerns in the court of law and was successful most of the time.
Born on October7, 1927, the seventh child of ten for his parents, Frances and Frederick Semple, at Number Eight Village, West Coast Berbice, Norman moved with the family to East Berbice in 1938. And it is there that he grew up.
During his childhood days, his father, a boat-builder, purchased land in Canje, Voorborg, which still exists today. Originally, he said, they did coconut farming there, but had to rent out the land to persons due to stealing. He indicated that there are about 30 tenants. One of the streets in the area, Semple Street, still retains its name, after the family who bought the land.
Norman attended Cumberland Methodist School and finished studies at Berbice High in 1945. After one year, he started to teach French at his Alma Mater, and then taught at the Mission Chapel Church School for eight years, from 1947. Semple was a very active member in the Mission Chapel Congregational Church where he served as Deacon from 1947 to 1967, but had to bow out of that since his job entailed frequent travelling. This did not mean he stopped taking a keen interest in church affairs.
MARRIAGE AND ENTRY INTO LABOUR DEPARTMENT
The young teacher met his wife-to-be, Joycelyn, a student nurse, at one of the dances in the town. They danced and “fell in love eventually and got married”. The couple tied the knot on September 15, 1956. The union bore three children: Maxine, Orin and Shawn. A year earlier, he decided to enter the Public Service, in 1955. Joycelyn passed away in 2006 and Norman married Maisie Smith three years later.
According to Mr. Semple, he left teaching because he realized that another job could have paid a bit more. “It was paying more than teaching at the time and it gave you a lot of privileges because, for the first time, I was able to get a car of my own. I got a loan from government. And I became attracted to this question of becoming a Labour Officer.”
He was also one of the founding members of the New Amsterdam Cooperative Credit Union in 1959.
Mr. Semple had prepared for entry into the Labour Ministry since he had been an external student of Metropolitan College in London. He studied privately at home and later wrote the Inter- BA and then Inter LLB, which he passed in 1955. He then applied for vacancies to the Labour Department.
As a Labour Officer, he was enforcing the law. “That required me to do inspections of the various premises—shops, sawmills—inspecting all the workplaces, factories. There were minimum wages prescribed by law,” he said.
Mr. Semple noted that there were a lot of breaches, especially in the shops in New Amsterdam. “They were either not paying the minimum wage for the shop assistants or not giving them the Annual Leave required by law. And I used to have to prosecute a lot of people in the Magistrate’s Court here, because of my legal background,” he recounted.
He said that he was hoping to complete the LLB, which would have made him a full-fledged Attorney, but cited some distracting family issues as preventing this.
Semple then became involved in the Trade Union Movement. He became an Executive Member of the Public Service Association [later Union] of Guyana and Chairman of the Berbice Branch of the same association. Later, he became the Vice- President and then President of the Public Service Union.
He returned to Guyana in 1986, even though he received more offers to stay. Shortly after he returned, he accepted an offer by the Caricom Secretariat to be a Consultant in Industrial Relations in 1987. During that same year, he became Chairman of the Teaching Service Commission, a position he held until 1992.
After 1992, he assumed the Managership of the Berbice Mining Enterprises (Bermine) where he served until 1997.
ARBITRATION
Semple was always a dedicated Guyanese and took his job as a Trade Unionist very seriously. He became an Arbitrator and fought tooth and nail for the rights of disenfranchised workers in Berbice. He vividly recalled a case brought on by the Guyana Labour Union (GLU) that he fought, involving a timber company, sometime in 1995.
“It was over the dismissal of some workers whom they claimed were stealing lumber at their mill in Georgetown. The evidence they had there, they couldn’t really identify the lumber to some extent. I had to give them the benefit of the doubt,” he recalled. He stated that the perpetrators were later caught.
He also arbitrated between the GLU and Rose Hall Town Council, where they had dismissed two persons claiming that they were taking bribes. Another notable arbitration he did in Georgetown included the Guyana Graphic and some workers perturbed over dismissal. Reflecting on the years he arbitrated matters in the court, Semple explained that he had a distinct advantage over the lawyers he would have to go against in court, since he had a background in Labour Law – something which the lawyers had little or no training in.
He won hundreds of cases, save for a few.
VILLAGE POLITICS, CREDIT UNION AND LABOUR CONCERNS
Those years, he said, were like the cream of the crop, since he enjoyed doing what he did for workers. But he was also involved a bit in village politics in Canje. An individual named Percy Smith encouraged young Semple who was a teacher at the time, to run for a seat for Sheet Anchor in the Canje Village Council. He decided to run and went in for elections. “You had to have property to vote, it wasn’t [Universal] Adult Suffrage,” he reflected.
Switching topics, Semple then opined that the trade union movement is dying in Guyana and that it has “become too heavily politicized”. He noted that there is an absence of “even the very basic tenets under which Industrial Relations operated”, and explained that the Tripartism elements in the movement: the employers, employees and Trade Unions “are falling apart in many countries because you have the governments, who, because of their superior strength financially…have been using that strength to deny the other parties their right to bargain on this tripartite basis”.
“We have it right in this country. This government has been foisting pay increases. Long ago, you had to negotiate, and you can even go to arbitration and you had to call strikes,” he noted. He said that the process today is not as effective as it used to be “because the whole principles of the ILO were that the three parties were supposed to work out the issues…but the whole thing is falling apart”.
He blamed the ILO to some extent, because annual reports had to be submitted by the various member countries to show that they (the countries) were operating under reasonable parameters. “If you (the country) did not do that, they can blacklist you, employ sanctions. That does not happen nowadays.” He said pay increases had been the subject of collective bargaining for many years. “In the private sector there is still some element of that, but none in the public sector.”
Reflecting on the handling of workers’ disputes like the ones he fought for “back in the day”, Semple suspects that none of this is being done today. “I know the government had prescribed some minimum wages for shop assistants…but whether it is enforced, I doubt. So if you were to check in these business places, you would find that they are not paying them to what the law requires.”
Semple expressed his displeasure at the number of breaches that are occurring today in the workplace, especially in Berbice, the area where he once served to fight against such breaches. “They’ve got those people working all kinds of hours without overtime; I don’t even know if they’ve got any Labour Department in Berbice.”
He pointed out that Berbice once had its own permanent Labour Officer. “I think they usually send a man from Georgetown these days. How can you run a big district like this without a permanent presence?”
The veteran trade unionist, in speaking about the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU), said that there have “been some bad experiences with the leadership”, referring to one past president who was involved in a court matter. “How do you build respect? The union leadership had to be respected to be able to sit down and talk with the government”. “They (Trade Union Movement) have brought this on themselves”.
LIFE BEYOND LABOUR
Today, Norman enjoys a bit of gardening and lives with his wife at St Magdalene Street, New Amsterdam. He is Chairman of the Committee of Management of the N/A Coop Credit Union and still believes the organization is very much relevant to the Guyanese society. He would like for School Thrift Societies to be re-established in schools.
“It is very useful because it encourages people to save, you know? It is not large amounts…and once you train a child to save while they are young, the habit is there and it will develop as they grow older.” He noted that the reason why the School Thrift may have flopped was because there were some loopholes in the system whereby savings went missing from some schools, “because the teachers were supposed to supervise these societies”.
His life, he said, he owes to his mother, his role model. His father had “deserted” his mother while he and his siblings were small. He was 11 at the time. His mother, he reflected thoughtfully, was “the Rock of Gibraltar” during those tough times. “She used to be praying and crying Sunday morning, when we sat around the family table”.
Mr. Semple still has that same table (now 101 years old) in his home today. He vividly remembers when his mother used to sit in the rocking chair (which he also has in his home) and supervise their homework. “She would sit there, fall asleep—to keep our company—and, you know, she would sit down there until we finished our homework.” They would then talk to her and she would open her eyes and say, “no, no, I didn’t fall asleep”. “And that is a picture I have kept in my mind all the time, to see the sacrifices she made for us…” he reflected.