But is that strength borne out of the unions being dishonest with their membership to turn them against the government? That seems to be what some members on the government side of the negotiation team believe.
So we asked the union presidents today if this is true:they said that they are an open book to their members.
Elena Smith, National President, B.N.T.U.
"We know as leaders and our members are right here, some of them, that everything that is discuss in our meetings we take back to them. It goes back to the point where some of our members believe that we are putting things to them. We become accused of siding with the government because we go back and present everything to them. So if it is that we want to believe what the government is saying then we can go ahead, but we have our members who can tell you differently and so those kind of statements we dent waste our time with."
Gerald Henry, President, PSU
"The last document that was sent out by the prime minister, it says the letter of government's undertakings, this got out before we got a chance to look at it, so a lot of these information that we are talking about actually gets out before we even get an opportunity to actually go through these documents with our members and that's what started to create distrust with us and our members, but it's a good thing that they did it so often and they change the narrative so often that our members started to realize that the problem was not here, problem was there."
