At a Glance
Trinidad's Oil Economy, Working-Class Formation, and the Road to 1937
Trinidad's transformation by the oil industry in the early twentieth century created in the island's southern communities a working class with specific characteristics — concentrated in a single industry, subject to the particular conditions of extraction capitalism, and developing a labour consciousness that combined the specific grievances of oilfield work with the broader experience of being a Black working-class person in a British colonial territory. The oilfield workers of the south lived in company housing, were paid wages that the colonial administration had no interest in raising, and worked under conditions that exposed them to significant physical danger without the protections that organised labour had secured in the metropolitan countries whose capital extracted the oil.
The networks of labour organising that developed in the Trinidadian oilfields and other industries through the 1920s and 1930s were the product of sustained organisational work by figures like Arthur Henry who combined practical union-building with the broader political argument for Caribbean independence. The connection between these two projects — between the demand for better wages and conditions and the demand for self-government — was not merely tactical but substantive: the colonial administration's indifference to workers' conditions was itself a consequence of the colonial relationship, and genuine improvement in those conditions required the transformation of the political relationship that sustained the indifference.
The specific conditions of the 1930s — the Great Depression's devastating impact on Caribbean commodity prices and therefore on workers' wages, the increasing political consciousness produced by Marcus Garvey's pan-African movement and by the examples of labour organisation in the metropolitan countries, and the specific grievances of an oil industry workforce that had seen the industry's profits soar while their wages stagnated — created the conditions for the confrontation that eventually produced the 1937 strikes. Henry's organisational work in the years before 1937 was part of the broader effort to build the worker networks and the consciousness that would make sustained industrial action possible.
June 1937: The Strike, the Violence, and the Colonial Administration's Response
The 1937 Trinidad oilfield strikes began in June and spread rapidly from the southern oilfields through the island's other industries. The strikes were triggered in part by the arrest of Uriah Butler — the charismatic labour leader who had been organising among the oilfield workers — on an outstanding warrant during a mass meeting in Fyzabad. The attempt to arrest Butler in the middle of a workers' gathering produced a confrontation in which a police corporal was killed, and the confrontation triggered the broader strike action that had been building for years.
The colonial administration's response was swift and violent: troops were deployed, workers were killed and wounded, and the leaders of the labour movement were arrested and prosecuted. Butler was tried and imprisoned; other leaders faced charges that were designed to destroy the organisational infrastructure of the labour movement by removing its most effective figures. The violence of the response — soldiers firing on striking workers — was a demonstration of the colonial administration's willingness to use military force to suppress economic demands and political organisation.
The strikes and their suppression were not isolated events: similar labour unrest was occurring across the British Caribbean in the late 1930s, in Barbados, Jamaica, British Guiana, and other territories, as the combination of Depression-era poverty and developing political consciousness produced coordinated challenges to colonial economic arrangements across the region. The British government's appointment of the Moyne Commission to investigate Caribbean conditions was a recognition that the labour unrest reflected real grievances that could not be suppressed indefinitely by force alone, and that the colonial relationship needed to be restructured if it was to be maintained in a form that Caribbean populations would accept.
The Political Argument: Labour Rights and National Sovereignty
Henry's involvement in the West Indian National Party reflected his conviction that the labour movement's work needed to be complemented by specifically political organisation — that the demands for better wages, improved conditions, and workers' rights could only be fully realised within a political framework that gave Caribbean people genuine control over the decisions that shaped their economic lives. The colonial administration's indifference to workers' conditions was not accidental but structural: it was the product of a system in which the interests of British and American capital were the primary consideration and in which Caribbean workers had no political power to assert their own interests against those of the investors whose capital was extracted from the Caribbean's natural resources and agricultural labour.
The argument that political independence and economic justice were inseparable was one of the defining contributions of the Caribbean labour movement tradition to the broader project of Caribbean liberation, and it distinguished the most radical current of Caribbean politics from the purely nationalist current that focused on the formal transfer of political power without insisting on the economic transformation that would give that transfer meaningful content. Henry belonged to the tradition that insisted on both — that understood the formal independence of a Caribbean state governed by local politicians but still economically dependent on foreign capital as an insufficient and potentially illusory form of liberation.
The West Indian National Party's attempt to develop this dual argument — for workers' rights and for national sovereignty — in a single political organisation was one of the more ambitious projects in the Caribbean political history of the late 1930s and 1940s. Its practical achievements were limited by the specific constraints of colonial political life in that period, but its insistence on the connection between economic justice and political independence remained as a framework for Caribbean radical politics that subsequent generations would continue to draw on.
Independence Achieved, Promises Deferred
When Trinidad and Tobago achieved independence in 1962 under Eric Williams and the People's National Movement, the transition was managed in ways that preserved substantial continuity with the colonial economic arrangements — the oil industry remained largely in foreign hands, the plantation economy's legacies shaped the distribution of wealth and opportunity, and the formal transfer of political power did not produce the economic transformation that the most radical current of the independence movement had demanded. Henry had lived through the years of labour organising, colonial suppression, and the gradual constitutional reforms that preceded independence, and he observed the independence settlement with the critical perspective of someone who understood both what had been achieved and what had been left undone.
The labour movement's contribution to the independence struggle — the organisational work, the strikes, the confrontations with colonial authority that had demonstrated the depth of Caribbean working-class demand for change — had been essential to creating the political conditions that made independence possible. The settlement that independence produced was not the settlement that the labour movement's most radical current had sought, and the gap between the independence that was achieved and the liberation that had been sought was part of the permanent, unresolved tension in Caribbean post-colonial political life.
Legacy: The Organiser Behind the Strike
Arthur Henry's place in Caribbean history is that of an organiser — a figure whose importance lies not in the speeches he gave or the public positions he occupied but in the sustained, practical work of building the networks and the consciousness that made the 1937 strikes and their political consequences possible. This form of historical significance is harder to document and harder to commemorate than the more visible forms of political leadership, but it is no less real and no less essential to the account of how Caribbean independence was achieved.
The 1937 oilfield strikes that he helped to organise were one of the most important events in the history of Caribbean labour and independence politics — events that shook the colonial administration, produced the Moyne Commission and its documentation of Caribbean conditions, and set in motion the constitutional changes that eventually led to independence. The labour movement infrastructure that he and others built in the 1930s was one of the foundations on which the subsequent independence movements rested. His career embodied the connection between workers' rights and national sovereignty that the most serious Caribbean liberation thinkers understood as inseparable, and that the subsequent history of Caribbean post-colonial development has continued to demonstrate is the most fundamental question that Caribbean politics faces.