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A vicious case of discrimination

Jan 28, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
We continue as a country to bring our citizens into collision with each other. In a recent edition of your newspaper  we learnt that  “National Insurance Scheme (NIS) has agreed to honor claims of sugar workers.” The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) owes the scheme.
The Corporation was responding to a report in Sunday’s edition of Kaieteur News which quoted worried officials as saying that around $1.5B is owed to NIS, and endangering workers’ claims.
According to GuySuCo in a statement, NIS yesterday instructed its local offices to honour all legitimate claims for benefits submitted by sugar workers.
GuySuCo assured that the sugar workers’ benefits could not be “endangered” because of the “non-remittance of NIS payments”.
It is now over fifteen  years since the workers of Linmine were made redundant.  Their contributions, like those of the Guysuco workers, were deducted from their salaries by Linmine but not paid over to NIS.
These long redundant workers some of whom gave over thirty years service to Linmine, cannot get their benefits paid by NIS. Several have died without their benefits been honoured by NIS.
Despite several engagements with NIS no similar promise or agreement has been  made to honor their claims or pay their benefits.
It would interesting to learn both from NIS and Guysuco what criteria were used to guarantee sugar workers the payment of their benefits despite the non payment by Guysuco to NIS of their  deducted contributions.
C.A. Nigel Hughes

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