It’s Christmas Eve. Good luck with your late shopping

Dec 24, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I stay away from crowds. Always did. Always will. Every year I finish my holiday shopping around December 10. This has been my pattern for decades now. In my life I have never been in downtown Georgetown doing Christmas shopping around December 20 to 24.
I keep away from the heart of the city from around the 20th of the month. This year it was an exception. I had to be right in the middle of downtown Georgetown on December 22nd, because there was a session of my libel trial. I parked far away from the courts.
This year, it would be best to avoid the entire belly of Georgetown. You are going to waste at least an hour (maybe more) in various lines because the traffic is horrible and that is putting it mildly. Fenders of countless cars will get bumped. Not mine. I will not be caught in that vehicular jungle.
At times like these I feel deeply sympathetic for employees whose only time to browse as much as they want will be on December 24th. I am not sure employers give a day off for shopping.
This will never happen in Guyana. It may be an hour or two or maybe three, but certainly not a half-day. Having lived in Guyana all my life, and having studied this country as a student then as a professional academic, this is a land of heartless exploitation by business people, most notoriously family-owned entities.
I cannot see it being possible, even in the distant future, when employers in Guyana will give their workers a day off for Christmas shopping.
Do you know that in the most popular retail establishments like stores and supermarkets, employees on December 24th, go home way past two o’clock in the morning the next day? That would be 2 a.m. on Christmas Day!
They cannot have Christmas breakfast with family because they would be fast asleep.
The question is how much extra pay they get for that unbearable hardship. I met a young woman at one of Guyana’s most patronized retail businesses who told me she was constantly harassed for being late. She thought the chastisement was unfair because she never left the workplace at the specified time when her hours were up. She said she always works three hours over the allotted time and is never paid extra.
When she made that point, she was rudely told that she can leave the job if she wanted, but she must report to work at eight o’clock every morning.
You call that blatant, naked exploitation. And this is the norm in the workplace and has been like this for decades. The PPP Government says it is a Marxist/Socialist party of the working people. If the working people of Guyana believe such a party will help to alleviate their exploitation, then my advice would be for them to turn to the cemetery. The jumbies there may be more helpful than the PPP Government.
What I cannot see in the distant future also is a change in criminal law, where employers who rob their workers are convicted and jailed. Various critical studies of the Obama administration’s attitude towards corporate criminality reveal that not one CEO was even charged muchless convicted for financial manipulation which violated many US financial laws. In fact, the Obama administration bankrolled corporate defaulters. It is one of the major criticisms of the Left against Obama.
Even a liberal like Senator Elizabeth Warren (whom the Left prefer to run than Hillary Clinton) has called for tougher sanction against corporate America that violates US laws (for in-depth analysis of Obama’s favoured treatment of corporate America, see the research of the Centre for Public Integrity).
In Guyana, countless labourers have gone to jail for taking the law into their own hands. When faced with employers who didn’t pay them, they resort to “stealing” from their employers. Police charges followed and heartless magistrates sent them to prison. I know a case where a gold miner failed to pay two of her employers, who raided her home in retaliation and are now in the Brickdam remand.
What are needed in this country are laws that punish companies and family-owned business that exploit their workers. It is a violation of the law not to submit NIS contributions. Have you heard of any family-owned business or company that was hauled before the courts and a jail sentence passed?
Good luck with your late shopping, and for those from the labouring class, I hope your dollar can buy what you desire.

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It’s Christmas Eve. Good luck with your late shopping

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