For a hundred fifty years, petroleum has shaped the face of the Caribbean working class. It was oil workers who led the “British West Indian labor unrest” of the 1930s, and it was this industry that formed the basis of socialist economies in Cuba and Venezuela. The importance of petroleum — both to the class struggle under capitalism and as the potential basis of a transformative economic vision — is thus a key consideration for organized labor across the region. Trinidad and Tobago is no exception, and in this former British colony lies a significant reserve of over seven hundred million barrels, making it an important economic hub in the hemisphere.

Today, this industry remains the site of an ongoing clash between two competing visions of society. Faced with recent closures that are threatening jobs, the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) has not just responded with the labor movement’s historical demands for nationalization. Rather, it has sought to build a radical model of employee ownership in which the nation’s refineries are run by the workers themselves.

Following independence in 1962, hopes that the island’s wealth could be used for the benefit of the people were cut short by multinationals such as BP and Texaco, who continued to extract millions of dollars from the twin islands for private profit, carrying on elements of the plantation model and colonialism by other means. In 1993, the state took over the sector, founding the Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago (Petrotrin), but this short-lived victory failed to deliver the dream of a “people’s economy,” recreating many of the same problems as private ownership. With the state struggling to manage the industry in the decades that followed, Keith Rowley’s liberal-inclined government announced its closure in 2018, sending shock waves throughout the country.