The “Estate” is still a Plantation

Sep 28, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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There is an Arbitration Panel that is deliberating at this moment on the wage dispute in the sugar industry that deadlocked over the chasm between the four percent “increase” thrown out by GuySuCo and the fifteen percent that the workers’ union is demanding.

The literally fractional movements conceded by both sides during their negotiations reflect the conviction of the rightness of their respective positions.

Because of stagnating production, the government has announced that it will conduct a review of the corporation’s financial, management and production performance over the last decade.

This might offer a clue as to why management is so recalcitrant on the issue of increased wages for ordinary workers: the production figures on their website go only up to 2002.

After all, to offer a four percent “increase” in a climate where inflation has consistently been eating away at the purchasing power of money at more than double that amount is to actually tell those workers to take a pay cut and to bear all the burdens from the travails in the industry.

We do not want to pre-empt the findings of the GuySuCo review but over the years, we have consistently pointed out that the role of management in the retooling of GuySuCo to face the challenges of the twenty-first century has been studiously ignored, at the expense of the ordinary worker.

Whenever the question of wage increases for sugar workers arise – and it crops up every year – the wage bill of GuySuCo is invariably trotted out.

In one variant, it is pointed out that labour costs amount to over fifty percent of the production cost of sugar. But this ignores the historical reality that during the colonial era of Bookers, those costs were actually some sixty percent!

Sugar production is a labour intensive industry in Guyana. However, between 1992 and 2002 some ten thousand workers were reduced in the industry – all from the field operations.

This reduction has continued inexorably under the IMF’s baleful scrutiny. What this means in effect is that the productivity of the workers – the amount of sugar produced per man-hours expended – has been rising astronomically.

In industries such as production of sugar, workers’ wage increases are supposed to reflect such productivity increases. The contribution due to mechanisation has not been very significant because our field layout and climate (especially in the Demerara Plantations) are not conductive.

But very interestingly, when the wage bill is tossed around, no one mentions that local management costs, including headquarters, amount to some quarter of that bill.

No one also mentions that the expatriate management team of Booker Tate of less than ten men pulls in almost half a billion dollars annually. Initially the PNC was forced to bring in Booker Tate at the behest of the IMF/World Bank that was directing the Economic Recovery program.

It probably made sense then because GuySuCo’s management had been badly undermined and demoralized by the politicisation of the post-nationalisation era. The Booker Tate management services were a subsidiary of the firm that marketed our sugar to Europe.

However, it was not in their interest to create an independent and strong local top management cadre and they did not have the experience in field operations to strengthen that crucial side.

Consequently, we have an endemic crisis in management for which the ordinary workers have had to shoulder the consequences.

Booker Tate management services were bought out by a South African company and the present team has no inside track on the European market and certainly no track whatsoever on workers’ interests.

They are used to sugar industries such as Swaziland’s where seasonal workers harvest the crop while housed under slave-like conditions and have no benefits or work when they have to drift back to their villages to eke out a subsistence living.

For them, the benefits that our sugar workers have accrued at horrendous costs are mere fluff. It should come as no surprise that most of the “custom and practice” fringe benefits are now all a thing of the past.

In 1991, I wrote, “In their Orwellian style, the planters had relabeled the plantations “Estates”, evoking, they hoped, the idyllic pastoral ambience of the English countryside…(but)…The life of the cane-cutter is still closest to the Hobbesian state of nature – “nasty, solitary, brutish and short”.

He still enters the fields at seventeen and leaves twenty years later, a broken man at the age of thirty-seven who looks like he is sixty.

He still has to work six and sometimes seven days a week during the crop season and then at best has to live on the pittance he is given for the four days of “task work” he is offered in the out of crop season. He still can only drown his degradation in the rum shops. He can still not even be human.”

Not much has changed since then: the estate is still a plantation. Sugar workers’ lives are still controlled by the fixed times of the sugar factory’s “whistle”.

The fine black ashes from the sugar factory’s chimneys still cover their floors, clothes and furniture – not to mention their lungs.

Visit any pay office for sugar worker pensioners and you will see an overwhelming majority of women collecting the pittances: these are mostly the wives of the male pensioners who have mostly not survived sixty. No sugar worker can still afford to build a house on his wages.

In the present era, most sugar workers live in former squatting schemes, far from the housing schemes that Bookers had established for their grandfathers in the fifties.

Their houses are mostly improved from “outside” help. Forget the free running water that those schemes had; they now pay for water that hardly flows.

Maybe the government ought to establish a Commission to review the living conditions of the sugar workers, as the old colonial power used to do, which will run simultaneously with the review of GuySuCo’s management.

The wage arbitration panel could then peruse both documents before passing down their judgment on what should be a “suitable” wage increase for sugar workers.

But is the 2001 agreement with the World Bank to cap wage increases at five percent still in force now that the EU was allowed to break the “in perpetuity” Sugar Protocol?

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