Midway through our interview, Albert Aberdeen, president of the Transport and Industrial Workers Union (TIWU), demonstrated the qualities for which he was recently appointed a judge of the Industrial Court: an ability to find the narrow ground where fairness is squeezed between warfare and oppression.
It was some boss returning Aberdeen's call, but the trade union leader was jocose. "I wanted to speak directly with you so we could iron out something without it going anywhere," he said. And Aberdeen described the injustice a particular worker was experiencing. He showed how the situation probably arose through no one's fault. His tone was of someone advising a friend that he'd made an error, and Aberdeen showed him how he was denying himself the services of a dedicated and responsible employee.
There was no aggression or implicit threat. But there was no subservience either. Rather, Aberdeen's persuasiveness rested on the reasonableness of his case and the desirability - for both sides that it be settled without rancour.
Aberdeen comes across easy going. Leading the main militant trade union after OWTU, he still manages to avoid interviews, and delegates others to give comments for the media. His approach is to defuse a situation before it gets out of hand. It is a maturity that comes from intellectual self-confidence, and it's perhaps significant that Aberdeen came from a middle class family.
Born in 1952, one of Kathleen and George Aberdeen's five sons, Albert's childhood was spent in Aranjuez first, then Mount Lambert. His father was an accountant whose social mobility was paralleled by geographic mobility. So the family moved to Belmont before Albert was in his teens, then to Glenco. By then his parents had separated and his mother returned to Grenada.
"My father brought us up as a single parent," says Aberdeen. "That's why I have no difficulty in dealing with my children."
In 1968 when he was 17 Aberdeen left Diego Martin Secondary School to work for $144 a month as an engineer's assistant - basically a gofer at the Coconut Growers Association (CGA). Appalled at the $60 per month the maid at home was paid, he'd slip her something extra, until his father discovered.
"Two man rat cyar live in one hole," warned Aberdeen the elder. That evening Albert packed his things into two Five Roses bags, and with a shoe sticking out the top, he left home. "I went and sat in Woodford Square with Russia the vagrant talking and parading all night until it was time to go to work next day," he says.
Those were turbulent times. The same TIWU, which was waging a bitter battle against PTSC and the Industrial Stabilization Act, was also trying to open a branch in the CGA. Aberdeen got involved and called a strike. He was voted branch chairman in 1970, and came under then left wing TIWU leader Joe Young, one of the pillars of militant trade unionism.
Young began introducing his young charge to the radical writers of the time - Walter Rodney, Eldridge Cleaver, Fidel Castro - causing Aberdeen to cast aside his Lobsang Rampa philosophy.
"Reading about Malcolm X I felt when the bullet penetrated his chest, I jumped," recalls Aberdeen. "I was in the Black Power demonstrations, running from tear gas. I see a man riding a bicycle get shoot just so by a policeman because he didn't stop. They just bundle the body in a Ministry of Works van and throw the bike on top him."
By 1971 he had joined the Union of Revolutionary Organizations and the following year became TIWU's first elected Chief Grievance Officer. "I was around big men and I didn't even have hair on my face," he says of his credibility problems. "Fortunately I always had a big voice and I seemed to know what I was talking about."
For the next 15 years Aberdeen was responsible for all the grievances of all the different branches of the union, handling bilateral discussions, conciliation talks in the Labour Ministry and ultimately arguing cases in the Industrial Court.
"I remember my first matter in the court, a Neal and Massy case and Michael de la Bastide was their lawyer," says Aberdeen. "He was fit in those days, a rugby player, and tough and he had a booming voice. When he walked in I was trembling."
Aberdeen won the case though, as he also has against legal giants such as Martin Daly and Frank Solomon. "I've forgotten most of the cases I won," he says, "but I remember every single one I've lost because people were hurt and disappointed and they were lessons."
After the Black Power movement subsided, trade union militancy shifted south. Still, TIWU was in the centre. Basdeo Panday, a young lawyer, was leading the sugar workers union that he'd just joined, into a strike. George Weekes from the OWTU was striking against Texaco. Raffique Shah was forming a cane farmers union. Out of that maelstrom in 1975 the United Labour Front (ULF) was born.
"A lot of that took place in TIWU's office," Aberdeen recalls. "Panday asked Joe's advice on entering the union. Shah's ICFTU still rents a place from the TIWU."
For elections in 1976 Aberdeen was selected to run for he ULF in the Port of Spain East seat against Cuthbert Joseph. The party won six seats but Aberdeen lost his deposit. Thereafter, the ULF split into squabbling factions affiliated to different Marxist lines or just plain pragmatism.
"There was a lot of inexperience and too much self-righteousness - people were arguing from positions when an appropriate word might have averted things,: he says. "I decided conventional politics wasn't my cup of tea, that I'd be of better use strengthening the union."
Joe Young retired from leadership of the union in 1979 and was succeeded unopposed by Clive Nunez, who was in turn defeated in elections by Aberdeen in 1987. Now, for the first time in his adult life, he's about the leave the union he joined over quarter century ago, to take up his appointment as a judge in the General (as opposed to Essential) Services Division of the Industrial Court.
"It's bitter-sweet and traumatic," he says. "It's like leaving home: you're sad to leave but happy to go."
Having fought for one side all his life, can he now become an arbiter between the two? "That was the major question in my mind, and was the easiest to resolve," he says, explaining that the vast majority of the court's judges, apart from a few lawyers, have been from either the employers' side or the government's side: industrial relations experts, personnel officers, labour officers.
Even the few trade unionists appointed to the court - Carl Tull, Gaston Benjamin, Ursula Gittens and Joseph Granum - have tended to be of the more conservative Labour Congress school. Aberdeen is the first from the left-wing Council of Progressive Trade Unions (CPTU) camp. Certainly the old workers in the Butler tradition, Indian and African, feel both sadness at the movement's loss and pride at this achievement.
"I'm comfortable knowing that what I've argued was always with conviction," he concludes reassuringly. "People may have fears or expectations but if they are excessive they won't be justified."