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Another Labour Day
Editorial…
Kaieteur News- Officially, Guyanese workers celebrate another Labour Day, and we wish all of them a joyful day. Unfortunately, the celebrations of local workers, on this day of tribute to their toil and their gifts, are several shades on the muted side. Our workers should be on top of the world, but they find themselves frequently hustling along the margins, scraping the bottom of the barrel, just to get by.
Workers from around the regions cast an eye on developments in Guyana, compared to their domestic circumstances, and for them, Guyana is the place for them to be. Like migrant workers from time immemorial, they will take what they get, for it will still be more than from where they came. Thus, there are some alternatives to those Guyanese demanding a wage that is fair, which corresponds to their education, experience, and skills. There have been complaints, and with too much of what is troubling about them to look the other way.
Representatives of Guyana’s workforce should be up in arms, in the face, even outside the growing number of foreign business complexes operating domestically. To the detriment of Guyanese workers, too many of their unions and associated leaders have been converted to nothing but mouthpieces for political manipulators, dice to be rolled around at will. The Guyanese worker has suffered from the lack of intensity, and as is perceived in some circles, an absence of authenticity, in the type of strong representation that should be automatically theirs. The losses of the Guyanese worker in a time of high corporate prosperity are particularly galling and should be denounced across Guyana. Loss of the right level of pay, loss of the essentials, what are taken as the norm, in such areas as comprehensive coverage, equitable treatment, and the loss of the degree of dignity that is due. Their unions have been pacified, or put out to pasture, or pushed over into ineffectual corners. These are a few of the consequences of politics and business mixing in the wrong way for the wrong objectives: the workers pay harsh prices, bear the burdens of leaders who have lost their guts, their feet, and their pride.
The Ministry of Labour has not been that official sanctuary to which Guyanese workers and local union leaders can bring their grievances and get the kind of resolutions they deserve. There is too much pussyfooting around what is beneficial to the visions of foreign commercial enterprises. There is a deep and spreading sense that instead of the Ministry of Labour being there to give a much-needed hand to distressed Guyanese, there is more of an inclination to hand them over to the exploits and excesses of those who come here to grab every dollar that they can get from our booming wealth sectors. If and when Guyanese workers have to be the ones losing out on a dollar properly earned and rightfully due, then it is too bad that they have to be among the ranks of collateral damage.
To add to this already unhealthy, unhappy, and pathetic environment, there is a government and leadership that are not just in bed with foreign business interests, but are part of the bed. That is, the top foreign groups doing business here have seized every opportunity to jump all over them, and render both leaders and government into nothing but putty under their feet. Guyanese businesses were first left to fight on their own, but are slowly coming into their own.
Meanwhile, the rank-and-file Guyanese worker is still left to fend for his own. He is an ignored and inconsequential casualty of Guyana’s resource wars.
Why is it that in a country endowed with these resource gifts that workers endure with a minimum wage that has no relation to reality? How come in a nation with such quantities of nature’s bounty that the quantity of food on Guyanese workers’ tables is of the scratch-and-snatch variety? Meaning, the pickings are bare, and who grabs first gets. On this Labour Day, Guyanese workers should be walking on the world. Instead, it is the world that comes here to join with locals to take advantage of them, and with that, they must learn to manage, to survive.
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