There is a serious crisis in labour in Guyana

May 02, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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There is a serious crisis in labour in Guyana. And it has nothing to do with the differences between the Federation of Independent Trade Unions in Guyana (FITUG) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
There is a crisis in labour in Guyana. And it has nothing to do with the cost of living or the Value Added Tax (VAT). There is a crisis in labour in Guyana. And it has nothing to do with low wages or the prospects of the National Insurance Scheme.
There is a crisis in labour and at the heart of this crisis are four problems: 1) the shortage of labour, 2) the unreliability of the available workforce, 3) the exaggerated ambitions of those entering the workforce for the first time and 4) poor productivity.
The opposition parties and the labour movement would want us to believe that jobs are short in Guyana. That is far from the truth. What is in short supply is the type of jobs that most persons are looking for; the ones that do not require too much of elbow grease. Our unemployment problem is not about there being jobs but about the type of jobs that most people want, which pay high for little work done.
There is no acute shortage of jobs; there is a shortage of labour in the country. There are thousands of persons who no longer wish to work. They get by without having to work. They may have relatives or their partners taking care of them, and most receive healthy remittances from overseas. Why therefore work, when they can sit all day in front of the television and live the life of Riley.
Trinidad is right now facing a shortage of labour and, like Guyana, it has nothing to do with conditions of full employment in the economy. Trinidad has a shortage of labour because there are many workers there who do not wish to do certain types of jobs. For this reason, elements within the private sector of that country have been calling for labour to be imported.
The second problem with labour in Guyana relates particularly to self-employed persons. Many of them are unreliable in their attendance. Do you know how difficult it is to have self-employed persons work five days a week. You even have some hire car drivers who can obtain work every day, but who opt to work only four days per week because they claim they need to rest.
Many construction workers in Guyana can obtain regular work five and six days per week. But they prefer to work three days a week. When they obtain “job work” that pays based on the task done rather than being paid for the number of days or hours worked- they are only prepared to work three days per week. The remaining days, they claim they need to rest because the work is onerous.
One of the problems that many employers in the construction sector find is that if you pay your workers on a Friday, they will take Saturday and Monday off, because they go and drink rum on the weekends and have a hangover on Monday morning. When you pay them on Saturday, they take Monday and Tuesday off. This has been happening for years now in Guyana and makes the available labour very unreliable.
The third problem with labour concerns those who are just out of university and entering the job market for the first time. These persons do not want to take ordinary jobs. They are not interested in the long road of career-building. They do not wish to work their way up the organizational ladder. They feel that coming out of the University of Guyana, even if it is with a second-rated degree, they have arrived and their stock has risen, and therefore they should receive huge salaries, even though they have little or no work experience and no record of organizational achievements.
They need a wake-up call. Employers are not so much interested in all those qualifications behind their names. They want to ensure that those qualifications are backed by practical skills and a track record of achievements. Foremost, employers want to know what you achieved in your previous job and what you bring to their company. This is far more important to them than how many years you spent studying for that university degree behind your name.
Finally, there is a problem with productivity. A great many persons in Guyana are working, but what are they doing with the time they spend at work? You give some person a job to paint some part of the office. An efficient worker should take no more than four hours to complete the task. Instead it takes that worker eight hours. Labour is highly inefficient and costly in Guyana. And this is not just a problem with blue collar workers. Within the media in Guyana there are persons who are producing two or three stories per week when they should be doing that per day. And they have the temerity to complain that the hours are long and the pay is poor.
Employers cannot solve these problems with labour. And as such they are looking to import labour. Those who have managed to do so are not complaining. We have seen for example the better worth ethic, the admirable attitude towards work, and the increased productivity for foreign workers in Guyana.
It is time to heed the call that was made recently in Trinidad and Tobago. It is time to import labour into Guyana.

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