Migrants are being exploited

Jan 20, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There is a story circulating quietly on construction sites along the coast that would shock anyone who still believes Guyana’s oil boom is lifting all boats. Migrant workers—many from Venezuela and Cuba – are being paid as little as $5,000 a day for hard construction labour.

This is not rumour; it is a wage whispered about by foremen and quietly accepted by men who know that if they complain, they will simply not be hired. And when you are an immigrant in Guyana, you cannot afford not to work every day.

By contrast, very few Guyanese laborers now work for less than $7,500 a day, and if you are skilled you can earn between $12,000 and $15,000 a day. That is the going rate in a tight labour market.

Yet hardly any skilled migrant worker is paid anywhere near those sums. They work alongside Guyanese doing the same jobs, often with the same experience, but are quietly slotted into a lower tier of pay. Two men, one scaffold, one wage sheet—and the numbers don’t match.

This is not an accident of the market. It is a system. Migrant labour is cheaper because it is more vulnerable. The men and women who arrive to work in construction, cleaning, security, restaurants, and domestic service do not have family networks, political connections, or unions behind them. They live with the constant fear of losing a job that is also their lifeline to survival. Employers know this. So do labour contractors. And so, apparently, does the state.

Wages are only the beginning of the exploitation. Migrant workers need housing, and here another quiet racket thrives. Unscrupulous landlords extract huge sums for substandard accommodation. Some migrants are not charged by the flat but per head—five, six, sometimes eight people crammed into a space that would barely pass inspection for a family of four. Rent is deducted up front, cash only, no receipts, no questions asked. The arrangement benefits everyone except the workers themselves.

Budget Day is January 26th. The speeches will be polished, the graphs reassuring, the oil revenues impressive. It is hoped—though hope is becoming a thin reed—that this Budget will finally address the condition of private-sector workers, particularly immigrant workers who are bearing the brunt of modern working-class exploitation.

The government likes to call itself working class. It speaks often of social justice and shared prosperity. Yet it has disgracefully failed to link the private-sector minimum wage with the public-sector minimum wage. The gap is not just wide; it is morally indefensible. Public servants enjoy wages well above the national minimum, while vulnerable private-sector workers—many of them young, many of them migrants—are paid wages that barely cover transportation and food. The result is predictable: a two-tier labour system in which one group is protected and another quietly sacrificed.

Spend an evening walking through the commercial districts and you will see them. Young people selling in stores, working long hours in restaurants and bars, standing twelve-hour shifts as security guards, cleaning homes as maids, hauling materials as laborers. Many are underpaid. Many work well beyond forty hours a week. Many never see overtime.

Years ago, the law was clear: overtime must be paid after forty hours per week. Yet today even some government drivers are paid an allowance in lieu of overtime—a bureaucratic workaround that empties the law of its meaning. If that is what happens in the public sector, imagine the reality in the private sector. Imagine what happens to migrant workers who do not know the law, or who know it but dare not invoke it.

For Budget 2026, there is a simple and necessary demand: set the minimum wage at $120,000 per person per month. Not as a gesture, not as a phased promise, but as a statement of national priorities. Pair it with the return of rent control, targeted at preventing the blatant exploitation of immigrants and low-income workers seeking affordable housing.

These are not radical ideas. They are basic protections. If the government is truly working class, as it claims, it would implement them and resist the pressure of its friends in the private sector—those who want to pay their maids and domestic workers less than $120,000 a month, those who quietly refuse to pay overtime while proclaiming patriotism and progress.

Guyana is changing fast. Oil money is reshaping skylines and balance sheets. But beneath the cranes and concrete, there is another story unfolding—one of cheap labour, silent exploitation, and official indifference. Budget Day offers a chance to confront that reality. Whether the government chooses to do so will tell us far more about whose side it is really on than any speech delivered on January 26th.

(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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• exploited, Guyana’s oil, migrants, Peeping Tom

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