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The anti-working stance of the Coalition was evident prior to 2015

Sep 22, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – One day in the 1980s, during the period when the PNC was grinding the economy into the ground, a secretary in a public corporation was given a list of names to type. The names were those of employees of her workplace.
The list was about those who were to be axed as part of the thousands of Guyanese that were sent home after the PNC Government could no longer afford to pay their salaries.
The secretary felt special in that she was one of the first to see just who was going to be sent home. The list was the dismissal list. But as she read the list, she found her own name and immediately fainted.
Of course the PNC did not call it sending home dismissals. They coined a more elegant phrase. Just as how they had renamed power cuts as load shedding, they called the dismissals retrenchment.

There were persons who never recovered from that period. And even prior to the APNU+AFC winning the 2015 elections, it had returned began its anti-workers strategy.

The PPP/C won the 2011 elections but failed to gain a majority in the National Assembly. Instead of using its slender one-seat majority to boost the fortunes of workers, the then APNU and the AFC (they were not yet joined as a Coalition) started to institute cuts to the Budget which scared public sector workers.

The 2012 Budget witnessed the brutality of the Opposition. They carved up the Budget as if it were a Thanksgiving turkey.

There is nothing unusual about the Opposition parties demanding cuts in a budget. However, cuts should be based on some objective criteria and not be applied willy nilly, as was the case with the APNU and AFC’s cuts.

What was even more disconcerting is that in their claimed desire to cut out the ‘fat cats’, the Opposition parties decided to go deeper than the subcutaneous layer. They made deep incisions into employments costs and thus hurt workers.
In the case of NCN and GINA, only a single dollar was allocated. Whatever problems the APNU and the AFC had with these organisations, they ought to have considered the fate of their cuts on the workers.

In other cases, they cut employment costs for contract workers dramatically. Even if the so-called ‘fat cats’ were pruned from the budget, the severity of the cuts also meant that others would have been sent home had the court not overturned the action of the Opposition.

The APNU and the AFC were insensitive to the needs of workers. Some of these persons had financial obligations. They would have had to find food for their children and dependents. So how were they expected to survive?
Either the Opposition did not understand what it was doing, was following misguided advice, or was simply using workers as pawns in a most vicious game to extract concessions from the government.
One of the concessions it was seeking was a reduction in VAT. But what sense does it make to ask for a cut in VAT? Does the opposition really believe that cutting VAT was going to reduce the cost of living for the poor man? It will not.

The Opposition parties were not proposing a massive cut in VAT. They were only proposing a minor cut of one or two percent. How much was one or two percent going to reduce the cost of living of the average consumer?
Even a five percent cut was not going to help much, since most of the basic items were already zero rated. Therefore, the small cuts in VAT proposed by the Opposition parties will make no difference to the small man, but will make a significant difference to those who are selling goods to the tune of hundreds of millions each year.

The Opposition was also way off-track by attempting to cut public expenditures at a time when the economy was doing well and demand was increasing. It is well known that Government spending has a multiplier effect in the economy. And therefore any reduction in Government spending was going to lead to a serious contraction in the economy, which will undermine the growth of the private sector.
The proposals therefore made by the Opposition made no sense. What it did was to reveal an aspect of the Opposition that would haunt it when it assumed power in 2015 and began its viciousness against the sugar industry. The sending home of almost 7,000 sugar workers was a return to mass retrenchment.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

 

 

 

 

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