IMPORT CANE CUTTERS

May 11, 2011 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

It was always on the cards. Once sugar workers began to enjoy a reprieve from the starvation wages they enjoyed under the previous administration, once things improved in the economy to offer better alternatives, once the government continues to ignore the just demands for improved wages for sugar workers, the turnout was going to decline and it had declined appreciably.
Last week, we are told, only about 43% of the workers turned out to work. This is far below last year’s average which led to a serious decline in production. It clearly indicates that there is a serious shortage of labour on the estates, and that this situation is not likely to get better.
Sugar workers are now better-off than they were twenty years ago, and have found alternative ways to make a living away from the arduous grind of the sugar estate. Many of them have opened up little jobs, bought fishing boats, extended their garden cultivation. Many have found alternative jobs in the house construction industry, and many others who previously could not find opportunities outside of the sugar industry are now doing so because of the growth of many small businesses that always have space for both skilled and unskilled labour.
The Guyana Sugar Corporation has to face reality. The situation is not going to get better, and definitely not with the sort of wages that the sugar corporation is willing to offer workers each year. For sugar workers, they are in the same boat, whichever way they look at it. If they work for an unprofitable industry, they have little to look forward to at the end of the year when it comes to their production incentives and pay increments.
Low production means poor annual production incentive, which last year was belatedly given as a gratis payment. Outside of the industry, the work may be part-time and piecemeal, but it still tidies them over and they have more time away from the baking sun and the energy-sapping work of cane cutting.
What would you do? Cut cane and still struggle or work outside of the industry and still struggle?
Many of them also are seeing better opportunities for their children. Some of them have grown children, and quite a few receive assistance from abroad. Why cut cane when you have to strike for wage increases which do not compensate for inflation?
As such the sugar industry should not anticipate the turnout improving this year unless greater incentives are provided. If workers are given fair incentives they will work, but those incentives are simply not available or affordable at this time, unless there is a government bailout.
The government had for over ten years heavily subsidised the bauxite industry. It continues to boast that it is subsidising electricity to the tune of two billion dollars. How about not subsidising electricity? How about reducing losses so that the subsidy can be removed and plough that money back into the industry whose “blood, sweat and tears”, it is said was responsible for building the alcohol industry in Guyana.
Well, the government will argue that it does more than this. It will argue, indisputably, that the one-off payment it gave sugar workers this year, in lieu of a wage increase, was substantial. And it was, but it does not address the fundamental issue of finding ways of encouraging the labourers back to the fields. And once the labourers do not go back to work, then production will fall.
The sugar barons of yore faced a similar crisis, sugar producers in the Caribbean in the nineties also did before they exited the industry. In both cases, labour was imported from overseas. If we have to do the same in Guyana; if we have to bring workers from other countries to cut the cane, then it is an option that should be considered because without an adequate supply of labour, the sugar industry will fail and when it fails the country will suffer.
Eventually, the sugar industry will have to move to mechanisation. But that is a lengthy exercise that will also cost money that the country does not have at the moment. As such, mechanisation has to be and is being pursued in phases.
In the meantime, the patient has to be kept alive until that eventuality. This means finding labour. If sugar workers are not going to turnout in appreciable numbers, and from all indications, they seem unwilling to do so, then let’s do what the sugar barons of yore did: let us import labour. The labour can be found in Brazil.

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