To­day marks the of­fi­cial end of the strike called by the Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU), 90 days ago, to pres­sure the man­age­ment and board of ce­ment pro­duc­er Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) in­to in­creas­ing its wage of­fer to the 600 work­ers rep­re­sent­ed by the union. The TCL strike may go down in T&T's his­to­ry as the least suc­cess­ful in­dus­tri­al ac­tion ever tak­en by a trade union in this coun­try since the es­tab­lish­ment of the labour move­ment in the late 1930s.

If the ob­jec­tive of the strike was to force TCL to budge from its wage of­fer of 6.5 per cent over a retroac­tive three-year pe­ri­od, then clear­ly it was a spec­tac­u­lar and demon­stra­ble fail­ure. The com­pa­ny is no clos­er to yield­ing to the pres­sure on May 26 than it was on Feb­ru­ary 27, when the strike no­tice was is­sued.

The TCL strike failed be­cause OW­TU pres­i­dent gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get and the ex­ec­u­tive of the trade union is­sued the strike no­tice based on the en­tire­ly false premise that it is pos­si­ble to get blood from a stone. Clear­ly, when the TCL ex­ec­u­tive told the OW­TU's ne­go­tia­tors that the com­pa­ny sim­ply could not af­ford to pay its work­ers more than 6.5 per cent, the trade union felt that this was part of the give and take of col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing.

The OW­TU must have be­lieved that TCL would have suc­cumbed to its ag­gres­sive ne­go­ti­at­ing pos­ture, giv­en the suc­cess of its strike threat at Petrotrin, the state-owned oil com­pa­ny. It must have dawned on the OW­TU, in the last 90 days, that TCL sim­ply does not have the weight and im­por­tance of Petrotrin.

A strike at the oil com­pa­ny would have crip­pled this coun­try-which is so de­pen­dent on ve­hic­u­lar trans­porta­tion-dam­aged its econ­o­my and harmed its rep­u­ta­tion as a re­li­able source of en­er­gy prod­ucts to the re­gion and the world. As it turns out, the strike at TCL was a mas­sive in­con­ve­nience to users of ce­ment, who were af­fect­ed by sup­ply chal­lenges and high­er prices, and there is anec­do­tal ev­i­dence that the econ­o­my suf­fered col­lat­er­al dam­age.

But, at the end of the day, TCL was able to ad­just its sup­ply chain and im­port ce­ment from its sub­sidiaries in Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica. The union's ap­par­ent mis­judg­ment was based on a mis­read­ing of the true fi­nan­cial po­si­tion of TCL. For the fi­nan­cial year end­ing De­cem­ber 31, 2010, TCL de­clared an au­dit­ed loss of $80.3 mil­lion.

The com­pa­ny's unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cial po­si­tion as at the third quar­ter of 2011-the lat­est in­for­ma­tion avail­able to the union be­fore it took the de­ci­sion to strike-was a loss of $131.9 mil­lion. That the union ex­pect­ed the com­pa­ny to grant its work­ers a dou­ble-dig­it wage in­crease in that con­text seems ut­ter­ly naive.

The sit­u­a­tion at TCL is even more amaz­ing giv­en that in Jan­u­ary 2011 the com­pa­ny de­clared it­self in­sol­vent-as in un­able to pay its debts when they be­come due-and had been ne­go­ti­at­ing the re­struc­tur­ing of $1.8 bil­lion in debt with its cred­i­tors for 13 months when the strike was called.

Those ne­go­ti­a­tions gave any one of TCL's cred­i­tors the right to "de­mand im­me­di­ate re­pay­ment of all out­stand­ing oblig­a­tions" and have the com­pa­ny for­mal­ly placed be­fore a bank­rupt­cy judge. In light of this threat of ex­tinc­tion, the union's de­mands were not even in the ball­park of re­al­i­ty.

They should have been told so in no un­cer­tain terms by TCL's man­age­ment-which should nev­er even have coun­te­nanced a dis­cus­sion of a wage in­crease, when what was ac­tu­al­ly called for were salary cuts.