Civil servants marched on Cabinet last week demanding more help for struggling families and they pledged to do it again to ensure their calls for no redundancies and a price freeze on essential services are heard.But are the current tensions with Government likely to reach the pitch they did in 1981, when more than 10,000 public and private sector workers walked off the job in protest at poor wages and conditions?Sam Strangeways asked some of those involved in the General Strike, which ended 30 years ago this week, to reflect on then and now.Ottiwell Simmons and Gladwyn Simmons may have been part of the same labour movement that brought Bermuda to a standstill in spring 1981, but their views on today's strife between workers and Government couldn't be more different.The former scoffs at the idea that there could be another General Strike; the latter thinks it's almost inevitable that there will be some kind of uprising from an angry, disenfranchised populace.Ottiwell Simmons was the president of the Bermuda Industrial Union 30 years ago: a confident, Oxford-educated, 47-year-old negotiator and Progressive Labour Party MP.“It seems to me the situation is nowhere near the same as it was in 1980 and 1981,” he says. “It was a period of excessive increase in prices etc.“It was one of the worst periods of inflation that the western hemisphere had been seeing and inflation hit as high as 19.5 percent. Just the whole question of inflation [now]: we are talking about percentages that are way below double digits. It's just no comparison.”Gladwyn Simmons, a 29-year-old kitchen porter and president of the BIU's hospital workers' division in 1981, who is now an event organiser and blogger promoting the concept of “Unity in the Community”, disagrees.“We are at that same point again,” he claims. “If you are noticing, there's a whole lot of social upheaval going on. It's looking for a way to surface beyond that traditional tendency of leadership that the PLP and the unions represent.“I feel that now, in these circumstances, it's far more volatile than in ‘81. In ‘81, Bermuda's balance of payments was strong, very strong, and the whole social dynamic was different.”Back then, the issue on the table was wages. Hundreds of blue-collar Government workers and non-clinical hospital employees were asking for a 24 percent pay rise in the first year; Government was offering 15 percent.Then, as now, the western world was dealing with a recession that, as Ottiwell Simmons notes in a memoir he is writing, “even had the economists grappling for solutions”.The parties were unable to reach an agreed settlement, prompting picket lines which began in April and continued into May, eventually involving an estimated 11,000 unhappy workers.With hotels closing and cruise ships and planes no longer coming to the Island, Government was ultimately forced to agree to pay increases averaging about 20 percent.That kind of figure is barely imaginable in today's climate, when most employees are being asked to accept pay freezes to avoid redundancies.A march involving about 600 members of the Bermuda Public Services Union (BPSU) last week saw them ask for a guarantee on no job losses if they accepted no pay rise, plus a commitment from Government to try to ease the financial burden on families.Premier Paula Cox hasn't agreed to either demand, arguing that Government isn't in a position to impose price controls on essential services or promise that there won't be job cuts.Ottiwell Simmons says in 1981 asking workers to agree to a 15 percent pay increase was really “tantamount to a wage cut” due to soaring inflation.The “crunch” which led to the General Strike, he claims, was that though he was “not everybody's favourite person”, the UBP Government was “becoming very unpopular with the people”.The workers' demands were not viewed by the general population as excessive, according to the retired Pembroke East MP. “There was so much support for you,” he says. “You just felt like you were somebody for a change.”That backing from so many people made Government's position untenable, according to Mr Simmons, and it had little choice but to cave in.He doesn't see today's situation as remotely similar. “If Government and the unions don't have the ability to resolve the matters that are making them both unhappy, then it would be a reflection on the participants in such negotiations. It's an indictment.“I would say there is no reason, in my opinion, that the parties can't get any differences that they have here resolved without any major interruptions in this society.”Gladwyn Simmons sees it differently. He thinks there will be more than a major interruption.“You think the frustration is going to die out?” he asks. “It's going to get worse.”He cites the spiralling gun crime that has seen 16 men murdered since May 2009 as evidence of deep social unrest and suggests that, ultimately, Bermuda may find itself in a situation not too dissimilar to Egypt, Liberia and Yemen.If that sounds far-fetched, the Emperial Group director is unrepentant. “You have got a people sentiment that's rising,” he says. “‘81 took the union and the whole country by surprise.”Mr Simmons says race played a major part in the events of 1981 and the Establishment of the day had little grasp of the plight of poorly paid workers.That has not changed, he claims, despite the fact that “now you have got a black government, to all intents and purposes”.“I don't feel there's any real understanding. I would say there tends to be a distinct lack of understanding with regards to how the higher echelons address the people of the country in general.“I think there is a genuine sense of disconnect in terms of understanding.”He says 1981 was a non-violent “show of strength” that emanated from the people, as opposed to from any political party. “The element is there now,” he says. “The Opposition is weak and the Government of the day is weak.”The economic problems faced by many today could be the catalyst for a protest that is less peaceful than the one three decades ago, warns Mr Simmons.“How long you think it's going to be before these gangs start to get more political? If they are not afraid to kill each other, you are not afraid to kill something else.”The answer, he argues, may lie in analysing what sparked the mass demonstrations of 1981.“We need to have a forum around that,” he says, adding that Cabinet papers from the time should now be released into the public domain.Two men on the other side of the table during the 1981 dispute, former Cabinet Ministers Sir John Swan and Jim Woolridge, are also poles apart when it comes to their reflections on the era.Mr Woolridge, who was then 54, is adamant the country would not have ground to a halt if Sir John, then Labour Minister, had referred the wage dispute to arbitration.“Let's say mistakes were made and the country paid dearly for it and I think we are still suffering the repercussions of it,” he says.But former Premier Sir John, who was aged 45 at the time of the General Strike, counters: “It's disingenuous of Mr Woolridge to simply throw things out. It's cute for him to say that now. He must remember that he was Minister of Tourism and that was the collective decision of what we would do.“I don't think arbitration would have settled it at all. Just handing it over to somebody to make a decision wasn't going to solve the problem, it was going to exacerbate it, probably.“Eventually we settled for 18.5 percent which was less than what they wanted.”Like Ottiwell Simmons, he sees the disagreement taking place today between civil servants and Government as happening in a very different environment.The UBP Government of 1981 stuck to its guns, he says, because it had to consider the short and long-term impact on the public purse of a hefty pay rise. At the time, it could expect Bermuda's fortunes to rise as the US came out of its recession.Now, he argues: “We are not in a strong position and neither is the US economy. I think that common sense and a recognition of prevailing conditions has to be the process that brings it to some type of conclusion.“I don't see how Government can tie its hands and try to predict what's going to happen in the future. What they [civil servants] are asking the Government to do is give them safeguards. How can they do it?”Mr Woolridge won't comment on whether the workers of 1981 had a fair case to make.Nor will he try to predict whether Bermuda is heading towards another major showdown between unions and those running the country because he's “not in touch with all the facts”.But he says the General Strike was devastating for tourism and the Island has never really bounced back. “It was a very sad day for Bermuda.”A request from The Royal Gazette to Government to release the Cabinet papers relating to the General Strike got no response this week.l Useful websites: www.bpsu.bm, www.gov.bm, www.plp.bm, www.ubp.bm, http://worldvibe.wordpress.com (Unity in the Community blog).