Pathological and mendacious?
Dear Editor,
While I don’t usually attach much significance to the speeches that most of our politicians make from time to time, I must say that I found the Labour Day speech of the prime minister most interesting and typical. According to Mr Golding, we must respect our workers.
Mr Golding made this most telling speech at a time when he heads a government that is refusing to honour its own commitments to its workers. Government workers have been languishing for over two years, waiting for the Golding-led government to live up to its contractual agreement to pay overdue salary increases.
Indeed, Mr Golding’s government has negotiated an agreement with the IMF to freeze salaries for some more years to come. It seems as if these negotiations that the government is having with the workers are a deliberate way to avoid paying what it owes. If the action of Mr Golding’s government is not an act of disrespecting its own workers, then I am at a loss as to what else it could be.
We all know that Mr Golding knows that we know that he has a special gift of saying things that he really doesn’t mean. But why did he have to slap the faces of our civil servants by choosing Labour Day to demonstrate this special talent of his?
I know a lot of civil servants who were not amused by that speech. I, for one, think that that speech bordered on the pathological and mendacious.
Michael A Dingwall
Kingston
michael_a_dingwall@hotmail.com