Latest update May 3rd, 2024 5:06 PM
Nov 25, 2008 Editorial
The Arbitration Tribunal constituted to arrive at a “consensus” in the wage dispute that had degenerated in an industry-wide three-day strike in the sugar industry announced its decision: a six percent across-the-board wage increase plus a 2.1 percent cost-of-living adjustment for the workers.
This award in effect matches the rate of inflation for the year, and the bottom line is that workers in the sugar industry will simply be marking time.
In purchasing power terms – the only terms that matter when discussing money – there has been no increase for the sugar workers.
The management of GuySuCo expressed disappointment at the decision, and pointed to the projected loss the corporation expects to post at the end of the year.
The corporation, however, had proffered a 5.5 percent “increase,” as opposed to the union’s demand for 14.25 percent by the end of the negotiations that had preceded the move to arbitration. We are not sure why the corporation is troubled about acquiring the money necessary to cover the six percent wage award, since this quantum is only half a percent above the sugar company’s final offer, and should have been budgeted into the accounts. Did GuySuCo expect to pay no increase? The 2.1 percent COLA will not have to be paid until March 2009.
The president of the major sugar union, GAWU, correctly pointed out the disincentive that the award represents to those workers who keep going the major earner of foreign exchange for the country.
Over the past few years, the industry has almost reverted to the shortage of labour that was endemic in the industry in the late eighties and early nineties.
The reason for the shortage then was the same as it is today – a wage structure that could not support a worker and his family, even if the worker toiled for all the days that were available to him in the industry.
Non-sugar workers have to be reminded that a permanent worker in the sugar industry cannot work throughout the year, even if he or she desires to.
The comment made recently by the Minister of Agriculture that the new Skeldon Factory, when operational, will process cane for only twenty-five weeks in a year should raise the question as to what the sugar workers would be doing during the remaining twenty-seven weeks in the year.
After years of struggle, they now have to be offered four days of backbreaking work in the fields per week at approximately a thousand dollars per day. Most workers decline the offer and seek seasonal employment elsewhere.
The wage award for 2008 will guarantee that fewer workers will show up in 2009. And the downward spiral into which the industry plunged in the eighties will be resurrected.
Even though the management of GuySuCo evidently believes otherwise, with all their best laid plans of mechanisation, workers can never be totally dispensed with, and whenever the disincentives kick in, the better workers will depart the industry and productivity will plummet.
They should remember that twenty eight thousand workers – ten thousand more than today – could not produce half of the present production, paltry as that is. The missing ingredient was the incentive of a living wage.
The President of GAWU also highlighted the central element that is unfair to the workers: the increasing unprofitability of Guysuco is not due to any shortcoming of the ordinary workers – it is unquestionably a failure of the managers of the corporation.
As the figures above imply, the productivity of the workers have more than doubled since the early nineties, and this is all that can be demanded from workers.
An example of managerial incompetence can be gleaned from the fact that, in 2001 at Uitvlugt, the estate operated until Christmas, yet this year, due to a lack of cane in the fields, workers have been home since the end of October.
How can an estate lose almost two months of production because of cane? Were any managers fired? There is also, of course, the small matter of workers being denied full employment and wages.
The workers will in all likelihood have to accept the wage award – they are between a rock and a hard place. But the management of GuySuCo are shooting themselves in the foot. Do they care?
THEM PIMPING OUT GUYANA.
May 03, 2024
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