There must be the political will to agree that GuySuCo cannot be business as usual

Jun 23, 2015 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
I refer to an article captioned “GuySuCo bailouts unsustainable – Ram” carried in June 22 edition of the Stabroek News, and fully agree that in the current circumstance of the company producing sugar at US$0.40 per pound and selling the product at US$0.13, it is certainly not sustainable to have perpetual bailouts.
Guyana is too poor a nation to perpetually provide billions of dollars of bailouts each year. The immediate past CEO had estimated $16B as a short-term bailout this year, and early last year, management indicated to the Economic Services Commission that GuySuCo had incurred $58B in debt. Imagine what this amount of money could do towards the improvement of the health and education sectors of a nation with a population of just under 800,000.
The biggest problem facing the company is its huge employment cost, which as at end of 2014 was 65% of revenue. GAWU’s bargaining unit accounts for 80% of the total employment cost, and more than 75% of this cost is paid to piece rated workers, majority of which is payable to cane harvesters. 1% of wages/salaries are approximately $200M. Recently GAWU has submitted a claim for 9% increase in wages for 2015, which if agreed to is equivalent to $1.8 billion; thereby taking employment cost to 69% of revenue. This is not a sustainable ratio.
For GuySuCo to become a sustainable entity, free from government’s bailouts, it would have to relook at all agriculture practices, from a labour perspective, incentivising key operations, so that productivity could be enhanced. New productivity indices will have to be determined for all key field operations. There is no way that the current establishment of field workers in general, and cane harvesters, in particular, could be improved; because cane harvesting and planting (two key field operations) are no longer considered attractive for employment.
The company has to improve on the current field incentives to not only retain those in its employ, but more importantly to increase current productivity rates. There must be a balance between the levels of mechanisation and labour-reliant operations, because the vagaries of the weather must be taken into consideration.
Skeldon is a good example that illustrates the exposed vulnerability of mechanisation. Whenever it rains, harvesting operation is literally ground to a halt on this estate. Research and development in higher yielding and more robust cane varieties must be intensified; as well as harmonising the efficacy of herbicides with the wide spectrum of weed species, so as to bring dramatic improvement in the high-cost area of weed control.
Optimum establishment on human resources will have to be worked out for each operation and department from labour to management and support staff, and those superfluous to the needs will have to be severed, invoking the legal procedures as adumbrated by the Termination of Employment and Severance Pay Act.
GuySuCo would need to start from a zero-based position. It is all the more important that new collective labour agreements would have to be ironed out; replacing the current which have outlived their usefulness, including agreements on annual and weekly incentives.
Engagements with the unions must now be based on productivity bargaining, rather than the age-old haggling on pay increase, without any bearing on productivity. There is need for a broader-based committee far beyond the scope of the existing Interim Management Committee, which is seemingly a band aid intervention, to not only chart the way forward, but more importantly to implement initiatives that will enhance the survival and viability of the company.
There must be the political will to agree to the philosophy that GuySuCo cannot be business as usual. For too long, political interventions and interferences have stymied management responsibilities in not only managing the business, but in strategically charting the way forward on labour relations, in particular.
GuySuCo cannot be business as usual. It’s now not about sustaining labour for political expediency and anachronistic customs and practices, but more so about saving an entire industry, and as the late Martin Carter aptly said “all are involved, all will be consumed”. These are just my thoughts into saving an industry that I served for 35 years.
Jairam Petam
Toronto, Ontario

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