WAS the recent teachers' labour dispute the equivalent for the Progressive Labour Party Government of the 1981 strike which forced the former United Bermuda Party Government to climb down from a position of attempting to hold the line when it came to public sector wage increases?

Of course, on a superficial level there is no comparison between last week's brief labour dispute and the island-wide strike faced by the UBP. The latter was a bitter, month-long labour stoppage that originally involved several hundred hospitals and blue-collar workers but which culminated in massive walk outs and a General Strike.

The UBP was forced to give in to worker demands, resulting in settlements that far exceeded anything that possibly could have been agreed to across the negotiating table.

The current PLP administration avoided that particular set of unhappy circumstances given the marathon talks it held with teachers which ultimately resulted in a new agreement, one in which Government was required to foot the bill for pay increases somewhat in excess of what it originally had in mind.

In that regard, while Government won the battle ? the teachers' strike was not protracted and it did not precipitate any sympathy walkouts in other areas ? it lost the war as the UBP did in 1981 in terms of holding down pay increases.

Despite the ongoing behind-closed-door talks between Government and the teachers union, Premier Alex Scott and his Education Minister Terry Lister were visibly uncomfortable when confronted by angry students protesting outside Parliament in favour of their teachers and the impact a virtual wage-freeze would have on their education.

This was an historic protest, for unlike the last time students marched on Parliament several years ago (along with their parents and angry teachers, over the self-same issue ? pay parity between teachers and their white-collar civil service counterparts), this protest was organised by the youngsters themselves, acting to defend what they saw to be their best interests.

It was an almost apologetic Premier Scott who had to point out to the students that the PLP, when it was in Opposition, helped to open the door to social protest which the students now view as their natural right. There is, however, an old political saying in this regard: "Beware the tendency to ride upon the back of a tiger, for you do run the risk of being eaten by that tiger."

Yes, the PLP, now the Government not the Opposition, was put in an uncomfortable situation when faced with an organised social protest, especially one that seems to have emanated from its own natural political support base.

But the PLP leadership seems to have forgotten the many years when it was in Opposition, sitting astride the tigers of Bermuda's social protests and cheerfully spurring them on, confident that it would never be in danger of being eaten.

The fact that a gleeful UBP Opposition seemed determined to make as much political capital as possible out of the confrontation between Government and the teachers did not go unnoticed by me. Since moving to the Opposition benches in 1998, the UBP has become much more favourably disposed to those protests that pit Bermudians against a Government than it ever was while in power.

But that's the nature of Opposition politics, I suppose ? to try to exploit popular resentment against the Government of the day. Nevertheless, after 30 years of generally conservative UBP rule it still comes as something of a shock to hear the party urging on demonstrators and siding with working people. What a changed island we live in.

of changed situations, it is a myth to have suggest that just because the PLP has the word "labour" in the centre of its name that we have arrived at a sort of end of history when it comes to labour disputes in this country.

As the PLP has discovered over the last six years, when you are in Opposition you can afford to rely on ideological pronouncements but when you form the Government you have to contend with political, financial and social realities.

I, for one, never harboured any illusions that the advent of a PLP Government would see the end of labour disputes in Bermuda. Such a cessation of hostilities between organised labour and social democratic administrations has never occurred anywhere else in the world.

For instance, just last year in Britain Tony Blair's Labour Government found itself embroiled in a bitter labour dispute with the country's firemen ? strikes and all. And in the 1970s, of course, Britain was paralysed by strikes and left virtually bankrupt during an endless series of confrontations between the Wilson and Callaghan Labour administrations and the then-powerful Trades Union Congress.

The problem that the PLP Government faced in this most recent labour disagreement is that by attacking the teachers and their union the Government was perceived to be attacking mom and apple pie, if I can borrow the American metaphor.

It is a fundamental truth that the teachers in Bermuda can draw on the overwhelming sympathy of the community ? as the self-organised students protest made quite clear. Presumably, this is a political fact that Mr. Scott's Government is all too aware of.

And that probably explains why Premier Scott has so carefully attempted to mask his Government's reluctance to open the door to the subject of wage parity, which is at the centre of the teachers' demands.

The teachers have history on their side when it comes to this issue, a long history, in fact, that led to the creation of Bermuda's oldest trade union.

first union was, in fact, the Bermuda Union of Teachers (BUT), founded by such stewards as Miss Matilda Crawford, her sister, Miss Edith Crawford, Miss Adele Tucker and Rev. Rufus Stovell. The working conditions and low wages for teachers had been of concern for some time, especially among teachers in black schools because they earned less than teachers working in what were then all-white schools.

In those early days the idea of a trade union organising for workers rights was a radical innovation in the staid Bermudian context and for that reason, even though the BUT saw itself as a union, it did not originally engage in true trade union activity where the issue of pay and working conditions would be the first order of the day. In fact, it would take some 30 years before the issue of wage parity would be addressed in any substantive way.

Dr. Kenneth Robinson, Bermuda's first black Chief Education Officer, would eventually become chairman of the teachers' salaries committee. He set out a strategy to improve working conditions and salaries for teachers.

But it proved to be a long, hard struggle and he was made to pay a bitter price in that the mortgage on his home was called in. The threat of economic sanctions applied by the white establishment in those days hung over the head of any black Bermudian who would dare advocate change. Even a teacher who only sought to improve conditions and wages for teachers.

We have, of course, come a long way from those days of the 1930s, '40s and '50s when you could face economic repercussions from an intransigent Establishment.

But nevertheless it is still a measure of how far we have to go when teachers and the Government are still debating the same old question first posed by a fledgling union all those years ago: What value do we as a society place on teachers?