Latest update May 10th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 06, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
The gold and diamond miners have put on hold further protests. They are awaiting the return of the President to have a meeting with him.
The President should refuse to meet with them. There is nothing to discuss at this time. The gold and diamond miners have acted in bad faith and should not expect sympathy from the government.
At the source of the dispute is are proposed new regulations, including one for a six-month waiting period before mining commences. When the gold and diamond miners got whiff of this, they protested to the President who did the responsible thing by placing the proposals on ice and appointing a special land use committee to examine the proposals.
Miners are represented on that committee which from all accounts has not yet concluded its work.
When it would have completed its report, it is expected that this would be forwarded to the government which in turn would circulate the revised proposals and hold consultations with the miners to arrive at a solution. This would be the natural order of things, one that involves arriving at a solution based on consultations.
Instead, what we have is a situation where even before the land use committee has completed its work, even before further consultations have been held, the miners have acted out of anxiety and have called a protest which effectively shut down the town of Bartica.
Now they are awaiting a meeting with the President. What for? They have acted and therefore shown that they are impatient with the process that was put in place by the very President which they now wish to meet?
Why did they not wait until the land use committee completed it work and announced its findings? Why not give the process a chance to work. The President was gracious enough to freeze the original regulations, after he was petitioned by the miners. But yet the gold miners took protest action without awaiting the outcome of the deliberations of the committee on which they are represented.
The situation the gold and diamond miners have found themselves is not very much different from that of the bauxite union representing workers employed by Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc. The union and its supporters are calling on the Ministry of Labour to intervene to resolve a dispute that has long finished.
The union and its supporters want negotiations to commence. But that ship has already sailed, and it seems that the union and its supporters have not recognized this.
Firstly, the company made a proposal to the union. The proposal took the form of a menu of options. The union replied back to the company indicating a preference for one of the options. Thus we had a classic case of an offer being made and accepted. The question of negotiations is therefore out of the question.
The union called a strike and the strike did not last long because the company was able to lure many of the workers back to the job. This has placed the union is a credibility crisis.
If you call a strike and the strikers eventually go back to work, then those that went back are effectively sending you a message and you case is seriously weakened. This is the dilemma in which the union finds itself in.
The union was left stranded when the workers went back and this is what they have to address, not beseeching the Ministry of Labour to intervene. The union may not have called off the strike, but for all intents and purposes it is over.
The company was wrong to say that it was derecognizing the union. It cannot do this and the Ministry of Labour has also made this point. The issue of whether the company can rescind the collective bargaining agreement because of what it perceives as alleged breaches of the agreement depends on the requisite clauses contained in the agreement.
The company may allege a moral case that it was forced to rescind the agreement because of what it perceives as continued breaches of the agreement. It will argue that an agreement that has that moral obligation to disassociate itself with the agreement if it is being breached.
However the process of rescinding an agreement in a matter of contract law and only the agreement itself will speak to whether it can be arbitrarily rescinded.
There is no such agreement between the government and the gold miners. But a pact was supposed to be in the making through the establishment of a process which began with the existing regulations being put on ice and the commissioning of a land use agreement.
The gold miners should not have acted prematurely. They should have allowed the process to travel its natural course. By calling a protest action, they may actually now force the government to claim that the miners acted in bad faith and thus the original agreement for a consultative process can no longer be on the cards.
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