Struggles over the Distribution of Posts in the Public Service, Private Sector, Cabinet, Parliament and Presidency

Abstract

In concrete terms the issue of inequality and distributive justice often turns on the governmental apparatus of the state itself becoming the most visible arena of inter-ethnic rivalry pointing, especially in terms of access to jobs and employment. In Trinidad, as in the Third World more generally, the government is the largest employer and civil service jobs are prized. How these jobs are allocated bedevils inter-group relations, becoming a perennial source of disputes and controversy. Generally, and most frequently, issues regarding equality and distributive justice revolve around claims over the distribution of material resources such as public jobs, state projects and subsidies (Despres 1975; Cohen 1974; Premdas 1989). In Trinidad and other plural societies, such resources tend to be dominated in particular economic sectors by the different ethnic segments in the population. As pointed out in Chapter 1, the personnel in the government bureaucracy has been tilted in favour of the Afro-Creole community in part because of historical reasons, pointing to the fact that in the colonial society, persons of African descent availed themselves of an Anglicized missionary education, in contrast to the Asian Indians, who feared religious conversion. The result was the dominance of the public bureaucracy by one community, which came to regard it as its own preserve (Premdas 1995). In turn, this fact has supplied the grist for inter-ethnic struggles over counterclaims for ‘equity’ by the disadvantaged community.