A conversation at the graveyard where a colleague was laid to rest led a group of concerned teachers to form Bermuda’s first union. As chronicled by Khalid Wasi and Carolyn L Davis in a history of the Bermuda Union of Teachers on the organisation’s website, Rosa Butterfield was the last of three teachers who had died in a short space of time when she passed away due to cancer at the age of 43. The headmistress of St. Albans Hall on St. John’s Road in Pembroke was buried in St. John’s Church graveyard in January 1919.
At a time when it was common for schools for black children to have only two or three teachers per one-hundred or more students, Rosa Butterfield’s passing had a profound impact. At her burial, teachers Rufus Stovell, Adele Tucker, Edith Crawford and Matilda Crawford resolved to form an organisation to represent the interests of educators, having learned that their colleague had died in financial distress. The Bermuda Union of Teachers was founded at the beginning of the following month and pressed for higher pay and better working conditions for black teachers. Rev. Richard Tobitt became the first president of the BUT. Rev. Stovell, like Rev. Tobitt an AME minister, became vice-president, with Edith Crawford assuming the role of secretary and Adele Tucker becoming treasurer.
Not only was the BUT the island’s first union, it was the first to register as one in 1947 after Bermuda’s first trade union law, the Trade Union and Disputes Act, was passed in 1946. The BUT merged in 1964 with the Teachers’ Association of Bermuda, which represented white teachers, to form the Amalgamated Bermuda Union of Teachers, but again became known by its original name in 1997. A quarter century after the BUT’s founding, a union with a wider scope began to take shape. In 1944, the Bermuda Workers’ Association was founded, led by Dr Edgar Fitzgerald Gordon. The BWA championed trade union rights as well as the end of segregation and the introduction of universal adult suffrage.
Two years later, the BWA having grown to 5,000 members, the passing of the Trade Union and Disputes Act was designed to clip the wings of the fledgling BWA, making it illegal for a union to have a newspaper or operate a business. As the legislation also banned unions from involvement in political activities, the BWA established the Bermuda Industrial Union in 1947. The BWA continued as the BIU’s political arm before it eventually went out of existence.
Both the BUT and the BIU continue to play prominent roles on the island. The BUT is the bargaining agent for all teachers in the government school system. The BIU consists of 18 semi-autonomous divisions and has some 22 collective agreements covering its full membership.
