THE PNCR IS OUT OF THE LOOP

Sep 30, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The PPP now has an Alberttown-Queenstown group. I am not quite sure how long this group has been in existence, but the fact that the PPP has been able to penetrate into this constituency shows the growing strength of the party, since, prior to 1992, it would have hardly been conceivable for the party to have registered such an organized presence in wards which have always been predominantly PNC-controlled territory.

The PNC, in fact, even had a party office in the Alberttown area. This office was located right next to the Alberttown Police Station. This office now seems to be defunct, and that in itself is a sign of the general decline of the PNCR in its former strongholds.

The PPP is making serious inroads into the base of the PNCR. The PNCR, in turn, seems to be shooting itself in the foot, and instead of reaching into PPP strongholds, is alienating disgruntled PPP supporters by some of the stances it is taking.

There is great discontentment within the sugar belt, long the stronghold of the ruling party. If the PNCR hopes to regain power, it needs to make inroads into these areas in the same way as the PPP is penetrating the PNCR constituencies.

This task is not going to be easy for the PNCR when it continues to adopt misinformed positions, such as its recent position in the sugar industry.

No one is disputing that the sugar industry is in a crisis. However, the PNCR’s recent analysis of this crisis is not only flawed, but politically misguided.

It is the sort of position that will increase the divide between that party and sugar workers, because some very unfortunate things were said by the PNCR which sugar workers are going to remember for a long time.

The most consequential of its many recent pronouncements is the one it adopted in terms of GuySuCo’s wage bill. According to the PNCR, sugar workers enjoyed huge wage increases which the company could not pay and still be competitive.

This is a shocking statement coming from a party which is on record as demanding increases in wages for public servants, who have enjoyed far more favourable wage increases (considering the 1999 arbitration award) than sugar workers, who historically have enjoyed suppressed wages.

It is unforgivable for the PNCR to state that the sugar workers were paid wages which the company could not afford. How did the PNCR come to this conclusion?

Is the PNCR aware that wages as a percentage of the industry’s cost is still lower than what it was in colonial Guyana? And we all know what the level of wages was then.

Ravi Dev made the very point in his column last Sunday. He also reminded us that whenever the wage bill of GuySuCo is tossed up as an excuse to deny paying sugar workers more, no one mentions that close to half of a billion dollars is spent on the management contract to pay less than ten persons.

How is it that we can pay to less than ten persons over half of a billion dollars each year, and in the same breath, as the PNCR is doing, claim that sugar workers were being paid wage increases that could not be afforded by the industry? The PNCR should be ashamed of itself for adopting this position.

The plight of sugar workers continues to be dire. Dev puts it quite succinctly: 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 with “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.

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