Tuesday’s meeting of the Memorandum of Understanding’s monitoring committee will likely be the most crucial in the 14 months of the historic agreement between the country’s trade unions and the government.

While the general consensus is that the MOU will hold, the committee will be under severe pressure to balance the scales. According to union sources, the committee will have to find a way to address growing concerns that the government has been riding roughshod over their members since the MOU came into effect on February 17, 2004.

Clive Dobson, who heads the National Workers Union (NWU), which is affiliated to the governing People’s National Party (PNP), is among those who believe some workers have simply been asked to sacrifice too much.

“It (the MOU) is too lopsided and one set of workers should not be subjected to this amount of pressure,” he complained Friday, while stressing that he supports the MOU, in principle. Last week’s messy dispute between the state-run Air Jamaica’s pilots and management opened up old wounds, with some union representatives pointing to the row as yet another example of the government’s inflexibility.

Wayne Jones, president of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA) – which has the most influence on the future of the MOU as it represents the vast majority of central government workers – said the Air Jamaica issue mirrored some of the ongoing concerns among his members. The government, he said continues to “demand sacrifices without consultation”.

He cited the Bureau of Standards, where, he said, the NWU had a prolonged representational rights battle “because the union was shut out by the management”. And while there had been a resolution of a similar problem between the JCSA and the Registrar General’s Department, Jones maintained that cases like these had helped erode the trust between management and workers.

The expectation had been that the MOU would have improved the industrial climate, a mandate which Jones appeared to suggest it had failed to achieve.

“The way managers treat subordinates is just that: they are seen as just subordinates. They do not have the voice of the normal worker. This has caused a significant breakdown in their relationship, because the workers don’t feel like they are a part of the organisation,” he said.

Meanwhile, the NWU, which has been harshly critical of the industrial relations climate at the Jamaica Urban Transit Company Limited (JUTC) and Betting Gaming and Lotteries Commission (BGLC), intends to place its concerns on the table at Tuesday’s meeting. The JUTC and the BGLC, the NWU said, has “consistently been in breach of the letter and spirit of the MOU”.

“These public sector entities have failed to conform to the practice of consultation and communication, and have been making arbitrary changes to policies and agreements without any reference to the established procedures for social dialogue,” said NWU vice-president Danny Roberts in a release last week.

“This continued practice will not establish the peaceful and harmonious labour-management relations envisioned in the MOU, and has certainly created a seething cauldron of discontent among the workers with the possible consequence of a resort to industrial action somewhere in the future.”

But despite these concerns, the NWU – like the other unions that signed on to the MOU – says it will not pull out.

Under the two-year agreement, the government promised to keep inflation within single digits and save about 1,500 public sector jobs from the chopping block in exchange for the unions’ agreement to a three per cent cap on salary increases for wage talks already in progress and a freeze on all other wages.

These measures were expected to help the government rein in debt and achieve between two and three per cent of real GDP growth between 2004 and 2006. The government was also expected to keep inflation at between eight and nine per cent in the first year of the agreement, with a further reduction to between six and seven per cent in year two.

As the cost of gas increased worldwide – partially due to the war in Iraq – the MOU became wobbly as local gasoline prices and most utility bills trended upwards. The government missed its inflation target for 2004 but the agreement held, despite frequent calls from the police that they desperately needed a pay increase.

The cops have steadily argued that they did not sign on to the MOU, but the government has insisted that the pact applies to all public sector workers.

The wage freeze-for-jobs pact hit another bumpy patch last week when the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU) announced that it would pull out – and urged other unions to do the same – after the Air Jamaica pilots’ talks broke down. But according to BITU president Ruddy Spencer, with the pilots’ issue settled, the planned pull-out has now been shelved.

“Looking at the bigger picture, which is what created the need for the MOU in the first place, the wider picture dictates that the national interest will have to take precedence over anything else,” he told the Sunday Observer after the signing of the pilots’ agreement at Jamaica House on Thursday.

But Tuesday’s meeting is expected to be intense, with the unions determined to assess the government’s performance to date and the implications if it fails to meet the targets set out in the agreement.