Court awards sugar worker $6.4 million

May 31, 2012 News

– 13 years after he fell while fetching cane
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) has been ordered to pay $6.4 million to a Blairmont sugar worker who slipped and fell while fetching a bundle of cane in a slippery field 13 years ago.
The cane-cutter, Harrilall Motilall, has not been able to work since the accident, and he decided to take legal action after the sugar corporation claimed he was faking his injuries.
Motilall was not in court yesterday when Justice Winston Patterson handed down the decision. The legal battle was launched in 2002 – three years after Motilall fell.
Moses Nagamootoo represented the sugar worker, while Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran represented GuySuCo. Ramkarran begged the court for a stay of execution of six-weeks, indicating a possible appeal by the state-owned corporation.
Motilall was 24 years old when the accident occurred. He was working with the estate since he was 15 years old.
During those nine years, he worked as an unskilled field labourer, doing various chores, such as digging drains, forking cane beds, supply canes to planters and planting cane top. The job of planting cane involved fetching bundles of cane on his shoulders and taking them into the fields.
On the day in question, May 28, 1999, he reported to work and the foreman instructed him to join other workers on the estate lorry. They were taken to Field 53, Eccles Section, on the Blairmont Estate.
Even though there was consistent rainfall, the foreman put the workers on the fields. Motilall was instructed to plant cane. He did so for two hours, after which he met with the accident.
“I lifted a bundle and put it on top of my shoulder and while walking, the dirt slipped away…and I fell and hit me back on the ground. I feel pain in my back. I couldn’t move my feet,” Motilall said in court documents.
The foreman instructed the other workers to lift Motilall and put him on the truck to take him to the Blairmont dispensary. From there, an ambulance took him to the Bath Hospital.
He was treated with pain killers and given an injection. Three days later, he returned to work and was ordered to do the same work. He complained that he was still feeling the pain in his back, but was told to take his medication and get to work.
Next day, while working, he collapsed in pain and started to cry out for help.
After the accident, the sugar corporation had Motilall going to several doctors and specialists. That was over a three-year period. All that time, he attended clinics for therapy.
Doctors at the Woodlands Hospital interpreted their scans to mean that Motilall had a “prolapsed disc” and that therefore there was “incapacity to work” and recommended “further need for treatment.”
The Medical Board of the National Insurance Scheme diagnosed the injuries to be “lumbar sacral strain” and “lumbar disc disorder” and recommended 20 percent partial permanent disability.
Ten years after the incident, Motilall was still encountering tremors and pain. The court would have observed that Motilall was unable to walk unaided and could hardly stand properly for a prolonged period of time and was allowed to sit whist testifying.
However, GuySuCo maintained that Motilall was faking his injuries and that he must have suffered some other injury for which he is attributing to his work on the fields.
His lawyer, Nagamootoo, had argued that Motilall would probably be unable to work for the rest of his life.
Nagamootoo argued that Motilall “walked bare-footed on cracked and ragged dams, which when rain fell would become uneven and breakaway” and even with his injuries from the fall, he was not offered alternative work.
According to the lawyer, Motilall lost his manhood and with it went the village lass he loved. In addition, he could no longer play cricket, which he loved, or ride a bicycle, or swim or throw a cast net.
Nagamootoo argued that the foreman on duty could have foreseen the danger of sending the workers out on a slippery dam that was not properly maintained.
It remains to be seen if GuySuCo will pay or appeal the ruling.

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