A plea for workers

May 01, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It is Labour Day, a day for all of our workers in all sectors across Guyana. It is helpful that this year, Labour Day falls on Sunday, a day of rest, with a National Holiday following tomorrow, Monday. Guyanese workers could use the rest from their toil, from their worries, from their fears, if only for a day or two, this Sunday and on tomorrow’s holiday. From all appearances, it might be the only relief that they can expect, and that they are going to get from Government leaders firmly and smugly fixed in their ways.
Leaders in this PPP/C Government have become cruel beyond compare, beyond what could be imagined. Leaders have grown plump with self-satisfaction that they can’t be touched; they can’t be made to see the light of reason, feel the hurts of the poorer, weaker class of citizens; and they refuse to do anything that would provide for some timely, much-needed aid to hurting, humiliated Guyanese. This applies mostly to all of our struggling workers below the middle of the employment ladder, who are left to scramble to get by.
Guyanese workers at the bottom, in fact, most of those not close to the high-paying topmost layers, are humiliated, because they can’t feed their families on minimum wages. Not even with much overtime, not with what is being floated around ($60,000, or some other close figure) by unions. This is because prices have outraced the proposed higher minimum wage numbers making the rounds, the cost of living has become a game of catching up that our mass of lower paid workers can keep up with, continue not to just lose, but drop farther and farther behind.
We have a PPP/C Government that still pretends to be a political group for the poor and working class of Guyana.
The Government cannot say that it is so much for wounded Guyanese workers, yet it is so heavily tilted to the interests of capital, meaning, the interests of the local commercial sector. The balance that is needed is simply not present in what comes from Government to the Guyanese working class. The attention and things made possible, all those favourable budgetary provisions, all those projects on which they capitalise most handsomely, are for the private sector, which benefits richly over and over, and then some more.
Leaders in the PPP/C Government are so full of themselves, so lacking in identification with ordinary Guyanese, and so out of touch, that they still dare to engage in the tiring, what has long outlived its original momentary usefulness. The top dogs in Government still prattle now with meaningless propaganda about $25,000 payout (a charity donation that was quickly gobbled up and gone), $3,000 Old Age Pension relief (a crumb when a little cake would have stood for something tangible), and ease on VAT for water and light (a pittance for the paupers that they make out of the people). Those have been washed away in the brutal daily assaults experienced by lowly Guyanese workers and their families, who wonder how they are going to make it to the next meagre pay cheque. It is what doesn’t even carry them half the spending distance that they must travel, to get the basic items that they must do without, as a matter of routine.
We have all this oil, and we are supposedly richer than Midas, which we hope don’t make us end up like him. We are reported to have the most promising, most spectacular GDP numbers projected anywhere for a long time. Still, our people are asking themselves, how come those same glittering GDP numbers do not translate to anything for them, have yet to speak to them in the language that they could understand. That is, more spending power, more access to the essentials that they now must forego, while others at the top of society roll in taxpayers’ billions, and live like emperors of old.
Our workers are crying this Labour Day, but their leaders are celebrating with their comrades from the cash that don’t come to the people who need it the most.

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