Trouble in Sugar

Feb 20, 2012 Editorial

This newspaper has consistently championed the position that the sugar industry cannot be made into a political football. It is, as some of the crumbling signs in front of the estates inform us, “the property of the people of Guyana”.
On the other hand, the government of Guyana, which is tasked by the people of Guyana to secure and protect their interests, has the responsibility of ensuring that our property does not join the signs and crumble into dust.
The strikes at Blairmont and Wales are merely symptoms of deeper structural problems that have gripped the industry over the last decade but they illustrate the dangers that lie ahead if the latter are not addressed.
What management of the industry seems intent on ignoring is that there are fundamental constraints that must be overcome if the industry is ever to become profitable again. The first and most critical is labour.
Sugar is probably the first industrial agricultural product and the plantation system that was invented to address the constraints in the beginning illustrates one approach to solving the labour demands: forced labour.
Once the cane in the fields reach their optimum level of sugar content, they must be cut, transported to the factory and the juice extracted within two days. Every hour’s delay reduces the amount of sugar available. So it was in the beginning as it now: once the ‘crop has begun’, all hands must be on deck around the clock to ensure maximum production.
And we should not dismiss the amount of sugar available for extraction as a mere technicality: from the figures provided production costs for sugar have gone through the roof. The difference between 10 tons and 17 tons of cane to produce the same one ton of sugar surely can be appreciated.
Slavery and then indentured labour first supplied the uninterrupted labour and ever since those systems ended, it was up to the ingenuity of management to fill the gap. It therefore does not take a genius to appreciate that solid labour relations in the modern sugar industry are vital to maintain its viability.
Against this background it is difficult to understand one of the irritants that allegedly pushed some of the present strikers into their action.
It is claimed that management and office workers were paid their “bonuses’ from the last crop while they, the field workers, were told there is no money to pay theirs two months into the New Year! Such a state of affairs would be seen as unfair in any industry but in sugar it is humiliating and iniquitous.
It merely confirms the suspicions of field workers that they are seen merely as beasts of burden. Is it too much for management to have offered that, if in fact the corporation was out of cash, all categories of workers – especially management – share in a proportionate deferment of bonus payout?
The other cause of the strike at Blairmont has been the removal or reduction of benefits earned from factors arising from “custom and practice’. Management has obviously been oblivious to the history of struggle by field workers to earn these benefits. It was truly a literal story of blood, sweat and tears.
While costs undoubtedly have to be reduced, unilaterally slashing ‘custom and practice’ benefits is not the way to go. The question of equity comes up every time workers are questioned. Are managers asked to give up benefits that arose out of their ‘custom and practice’, such as transporting their children to school?
Finally, the matter of equity also arises in the responsibility for other sources of the corporation’s woes. Take the question of low extraction rates raised by Tony Viera in our letters’ pages yesterday.
It is quite obvious from the figures cited, even though Viera does not mention it, something is either wrong with the new diffuser technology that is part of the new factory at Skeldon or we do not have the technical competence to operate it.
Whatever it is, leadership appears deficient in the industry.

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Trouble in Sugar

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