The PSC is seeking highly skilled workers

Jan 30, 2018 Peeping Tom

The job fair to be organized by the Private Sector Commission of Guyana is not going to find jobs for field workers, or cane cutters, as they are known. Which private sector company is going to employ those cane cutters whose services were terminated by the Guyana Sugar Corporation?
The Private Sector Commission is instead trying to gobble up the technically skilled workers, the technicians and engineers who have been displaced by the closure of the Wales Estate. The private sector is trying to steal these skills before they are lost to countries outside of Guyana.
The Guyana Sugar Corporation has highly skilled factory workers. They are among the most technically skilled in the Caribbean. The sugar industry also has some of the best agronomists in the Caribbean. It is these technically skilled workers that the PSC is targeting, not the unskilled workers.
The unskilled workers will find it difficult to find jobs in the private sector. Guyana has a large private sector construction sector but cane cutters cannot, at this stage, be easily absorbed into the construction sector which at present is very sluggish.
The construction sector will be unable to absorb these workers, since most of the construction work is taking place outside of the sugar belt, and no unskilled labourer will leave his family to come into the city or urban areas to work for low wages. It cannot pay them to do that.
In any event, the construction industry is encountering problems. The large construction companies already have gangs of workers whom they rotate from project to project. Some of them do not have sufficient work to keep all their contracted workers busy and so many construction workers are underemployed.
The Bank of Guyana has revealed some disturbing figures about non- performing loans in the economy, including loans to the housing sector. Disturbing levels of borrowers from commercial banks are not repaying their loans as per schedule, and the situation has reached such an alarming state that these loans have been classified as non-performing. The construction sector is therefore encountering problems and the situation will get worse by the decision of the government to ask the army to do infrastructure, an exercise which will undercut private sector production.
The Private Sector Commission is therefore creating a mirage with this trade fair which is being organized. They are seeking to build goodwill by trying to show that they are responding to a crisis in employment in the sugar industry. They are however more interested in the highly skilled workers.
In this regard, the PSC is no different from the government. The horse has already bolted and it is only after this has happened that the government is looking to close the stable doors.
The government had no alternatives for the dismissed sugar workers. This is a most anti-working class government. You cannot simply send home more than four thousand workers and not provide some alternative.
Before sending home the workers, the government should have been doing what it is doing now. It is shameful that the government, after sending home thousands of sugar workers, is now going to discuss the Indian government’s offer to help the sugar industry. The government had accepted all the other forms of support which were being provided, but it said nothing about the offer of support to the sugar industry by the Indian government. Only now we are told that the issue of support for the sugar industry will be discussed when a high level government team visits India this week.
The Special Purpose Unit which was formed for the privatization of the sugar industry is only now inviting expressions of interest. This is after the closure of the estates. All of this should have happened before the workers were sent home, because if some of those expressions of interests had materialized, there may have been no need to send home the workers.
The government is now looking for investors after it has sent home workers. The government has aborted its plans, announced when it took office, that it would convert GuySuCo into an agricultural corporation. It shows just how little the government knew about the sugar lands and their suitability for agricultural diversification. These lands need significant investment, something that neither the government nor the local private sector can afford.

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