Guyana Goldfields workers prepare for Labour Minister’s visit, today

Jul 08, 2019 News

Aurora gold mine,
Region seven

In anticipation of a visit
by Minister of Labour,
Keith Scott, rank-and-file workers at the Guyana Goldfields Aurora mine are mobilizing to send a strong message to Government about their specific grievances.
They have been having back-to-back meetings, since yesterday, to strategise how their meeting with the Minister would go.
The visit was sparked after the workers organised a strike on Tuesday, which resulted in work coming to a standstill for days.
In multiple interviews with Kaieteur News, many of those workers relayed that their biggest concern is getting union representation, since efforts to be recognised previously had proven futile.
President of the National Mine Workers Union (NMWU), Sherwin Downer, said that the union has been trying to have the workers covered since 2016.
A recent attempt by Downer to have Aurora’s Buckhall rank-and-file workers recognised by the Trade Union Recognition Certification Board (TUR&CB), of which Chief Labour Office, Charles Ogle, is the head, proved unsuccessful.
This is because Human Resources Manager at Guyana Goldfields, Peter Benny, told labour officers that the process would be more complicated than recognising workers at one unit, since workers are regularly transferred, depending on the needs of each unit.
Downer told Kaieteur News that the argument Benny made, which had effectively halted the application process, has no merit. Downer had alleged that the Department of Labour has allowed Guyana Goldfields to act somewhat with impunity.
There are several units, including Aurora, Tapir on the West Bank of the Cuyuni, and Buck Hall on the Essequibo. There’s also a Georgetown office at Turkeyen.
When the Aurora workers started their strike, the company had cut off the internet connection in an attempt to prevent them from communicating with the outside world.
But Kaieteur News managed to contact several persons and reported on the strike, forcing Guyana Goldfields to make a statement, announcing a suspension of its work, due to the strike. Even then, the company had blamed the strike on a ‘misunderstanding’.
On Wednesday, the day after the strike started, a group of workers had begun traveling to Georgetown. A team met with several officials at the Department of Labour, including Scott, Ogle and Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman.
It was at this juncture that Scott promised to have the union application process resumed and expedited. The next day, Government met with representatives of NMWU, the union the workers had overwhelmingly indicated as their choice for representation.
The Labour Department will have to conduct a survey of workers to ascertain whether 40 percent or more of the workers – the minimum requirement – has chosen NMWU to represent them.

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