Has the government really done that for workers?

Mar 30, 2014 Features / Columnists, My Column

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When I was a young boy and bored in school, I would get together with some friends and we would throw up some riddles. And some of these riddles were difficult. When I became older there were still the riddles. One of them is ‘What goes up in Guyana, scarcely comes down, and when it does it is only temporarily?’
This one is relatively simple and all of us have noticed this thing going up and we followed it all the time. The answer is prices. Gas prices, because of Government intervention, do come down but only temporarily.
In the marketplace some prices do come down, but only because of glut. Sometimes quality forces the price of certain items downward. But for the most part, once the price goes up it stays up. There were the minibus drivers who protested for increases in their fare because for them the gasoline price was high.
There was the promise that the price would come down once the price of gasoline goes down, but that is something for the birds. The fare never goes down.
I have been around for a long time, from the days when rice was sold at eighty-eight cents per gallon, when a Banks Beer was twenty-four cents and when very senior public servants earned $120 per month. A house could have been bought for $2,000. Then inflation began to take its toll. The prices rose.
Back in the late 1970s the prices for a house and a car were almost similar. Today the cost of a home has by far outstripped the cost of a car and it is showing no sign of coming down. I was running through the classified columns the other day and it was all I could do to avoid choking at the cost of a plot of land. Believe it or not, I saw a house lot in Eccles being sold for $14 million. Another piece at Providence was being sold for $60 million.
Taking the cake but by no means the highest price was a plot of Queenstown, Georgetown land for $120 million. There was another in the same ward for US$1.2 million.
When I was an Information Officer, I remember saying to my boss, the late Richard Linton Younge, that one day I would be working for $1,000 a month. His retort? “Yes, but the price of a loaf of bread would be a dollar.”
Today I pay much more than a dollar for a loaf of bread and I wonder at the high price I pay for so many other things. The truth is that I vaguely remember the prices going up. What I do remember is that whenever I got a pay rise, prices always seemed to increase much higher that the increase.
Like so many other Guyanese, whenever we got a pay rise, we always planned to save the increase. We were naïve to believe that prices would remain where they were and the extra we were being paid would just be more by way of disposable income.
I remember the days when merchants hiked their prices every time public servants got a pay rise. And to show how cruel the world of business could be, just recall the time when in 1999 the Armstrong Commission ruled that public servants deserved a fifty per cent pay increase.
No need to even consider the amount of extra money the public servants believed that they would have. Lo and behold, within two years that hefty pay increase had disappeared. Prices climbed and the price of my loaf of bread was among them.
The days when a cent could have bought three sweets for a cent is like something out of a fairy tale. Twenty dollars, I think, may barely buy one. And I smile when I remember people making the decision to stop smoking when the price of a cigarette reached 10 cents.  Today ten dollars can’t buy one, but I suppose that the army of smokers has not declined.
These memories come flooding back every time I hear that the government has moved the minimum wage from some low figure to where it is today. I hear the Finance Minister talking about the increase in old age pension from the level that the bad opposition, when it governed, kept the people.
I remember that when Dr Cheddi Jagan came to power in 1992, he removed the then head of the Guyana Electricity Corporation who was earning $140,000 per month because that man was earning a super salary. A few years later I remember asking President Bharrat Jagdeo about what constitutes a super salary.
We also spoke about the claim that people are earning so much more because the government is caring. He said that there is no doubt that people are better off. More of them are home owners, something that they could only dream of in earlier days. More people own cars and more people wear shoes.
I do not doubt those facts, but I also see the disappearance of the extended family because people claim that they cannot support relatives anymore. Just recently two newspapers ran features about people abandoning relatives in the hospital.
Are people being paid that much better than they ever were under the previous government? I know that they spend much more and I also know that so many more people owe the banks.

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