Labour Day – a rough holiday for Guyanese workers

May 01, 2020 Editorial

As we celebrate this Labour Day, there is remembrance of the great exploits and stirring sacrifices made by fellow workers in Guyana’s ungenerous industrial relations history. We salute them, including the just departed Komal Chand: may they find rest in a true worker’s paradise, that striven after fair and equitable ground in the trenches of toil and sweat that still prove to be so elusive, so hard to squeeze out of obstinate and exploitative employers, which, rather regrettably, must include the state.
As we observe this workers’ holiday under national electoral storm clouds, we recall something else that is bandied about piously during good times but fails to materialize when needed the most. That time of most urgent need is right now. What we recall are these words, grouped together in the catchiest of phrases: our workers are our most valuable asset. Yet because they are breathing and moving, they are the first to be sent packing, as in layoffs or stay-at-home restrictions made necessary by the imprisoning COVID-19 virus, without a lifeline on which to grasp and manage somehow in these grim and grimmer days.
The individual and familial financial pain is immense, it is wide, and it is spreading, the longer the lockdowns have to be enforced. Workers without income are quickly reduced to being without food and other basics of survival, into steep(er) debtor status, also. We will not insult our hurting comrades by telling them: we know the feeling. We do not since we have not been forced out from work lines into breadlines. We may think that we do-we warring political leaders, we seemingly empathetic employers, we supporting colleagues and citizens-but we do not have a clue as to what it is to be without any reserves of strength, which, sooner than later, compels us to be without hope.
The majority of minimum wage earners have little by way of reserves since it is an ordeal to get by from week-to-week and month-to-month. It is an ordeal now compounded by the drying up of the steady trickle of assistance that used to come from caring and generous relations in other countries, especially the US. This is so, because they, too, are bottled up at home due to the virus and with little coming in, other than unemployment relief provided for through the usual safety nets of state government’s insurance and the extraordinary and timely stimulus package bundled into the federal government’s CARES Act.
Oh! But if only our furloughed, rotated, and wounded workers were to have such a provision here at this moment of desperate need. We do not have any such thing, given our poor, struggling state, our barren and divided state. If only our insult-hurling political leaders were to prioritize the makings of some provision for any level of relief, through some time and interest spared to consider what could be done to ease their current financial burdens. If only those lusting after power could be moved to extend some degree of compassion to our suffering, hungering workers and their families, how different this Labour Day would be.
Different with a little more sustenance in the pot, a bill paid here and there, and a lifeboat offered to assist them in managing to survive these storms, which could last for months for some. Any help would cushion the jarring emptiness-in stomach, in the frightening visions bowing down many Guyanese heads in this hardest of guava seasons.
But our political leaders are too busy, they are too engaged in and consumed by the irresistible siren calls of power to pay heed to anything but what empowers them, to anyone, other than themselves and their self-serving ambitions. They will be the first ones, they will even join hands, these craven political leaders of ours, with Guyana’s corporate kingpins to voice solemnly and movingly about how precious workers are, yet not lift a single finger to inspire with a helping hand, when the chips are down. Many of those same corporate magnates-some local, some foreign-exploit, intimidate, and injure grievously Guyanese toilers seeking only honest reward for their honest labors.
Today, the COVID-19 virus has swept away just about all the chips that strapped Guyanese breadwinners had going for them. Now they have none left: not job, not earnings, not spirit. For there is nothing on which to rely, nor is there anything coming to them from any source. This is what our hurting comrades endure this holiday.
May there be better Labour Days ahead, starting next year.

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Labour Day – a rough holiday for Guyanese workers

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