Press reports have made the public aware of the threat of a bauxite company owned by RUSAL of Russia and the Government of Guyana to scrap a Collective Labour Agreement between it and the Bauxite and General Workers Union. I saw first a WPA statement, circulated by email, and because RUSAL is the majority shareholder, my first response was, “What do these Russians mean by stripping Guyanese workers of representation?”
The effectiveness of the union’s representation is a matter for the workers and the courts, which in Guyana have been known to rule that a certain union did not represent its members. Now there is the recognition legislation process, once labelled by Mr Lincoln Lewis as highly partisan in practice.
There may be hidden dynamics in the bauxite situation, however, and I would rather hear about my warped mind than remain silent on some of the possible dynamics. I have noted the role of a retired Commissioner of Labour as Industrial Relations Consultant, Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI). In Guyana, no such officer could take up such a post, without the consent of the Office of the President.
The lines in the Stabroek News report of December 4 “BCGI also asserts that it has lost confidence in the union, adding that ‘similar sentiments’ had been expressed by a number of workers” are helpful to observers. Moreover, in all this, there is no general outcry, unless I missed it. Some people in the society still do not really know the social economy of trade unions, the workers’ direct representatives. In the last analysis, I mean when things get down to rock bottom, it is their members and other working people, who bear the brunt of misgovernment.
The AFC has shown support for the Kwakwani workers, but the ruling party of Guyana, even now claiming to be the vanguard of the working class, has not been heard on this vital matter. Technically, the PPP is facing industrial isolation from the organised working class. Even its own child, GAWU, has had, like the GTUC and the General Workers Union in the early stages of the bauxite dispute, to reaffirm, in a mild rebuke, the basic right of workers to recognition and representation. Can it be that a healthy separation of workers’ interests and political loyalty is taking place?
GAWU itself has been having a taste of the ruling party’s respect for the working people. This is hard for GAWU whose loyalty has been so complete. Even the GLU from within the fold of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (FITUG) has seen the handwriting on the wall.
It is too bad that the executive government holds a strong preference for FITUG, as against the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC). The present FITUG is of course a caricature of the Federation of Unions of Government Employees (FUGE) of decades ago, which came into being as a rock of working people’s defence. Chase records that these unions felt “let down” by the TUC when they struck for higher wages in 1950. Yet the FUGE and the TUC faced a government committee with similar demands for $3 dollars a day against the existing $1.52 a day for an unskilled worker, for more than a bare-bones standard of living and against the omission of important items from the cost of living index. The bauxite workers may, according to the employer’s poll and revealed by people in the management, be disappointed with the representation they receive. I am sure that if GuySuCo listens keenly, it will find similar dissatisfaction on industrial matters and GAWU workers with their representation.
When the government virtually disobeyed the parliament and refused to pay the due convention to Critchlow Labour College, FITUG was silent, and no doubt sympathetic to the government. Fancy the forces of labour in any country, for any reason at all, denying to working people a route to further education and a new chance to qualify for university education.
What manner of unions are these? Who cares that the workers remain without a school to make higher education possible for them? When all the party and political justification for these mean assaults on working people are set aside, what faces us is clearly oppression by an elected rump which once made some pretence of some loyalty to the downtrodden and the powerless – in our case the thousands without connections and lines.
I learned recently that the bauxite workers are facing the kind of company coercion typical of the government’s dealing with the non-FITUG unions and more recently with GAWU. The management is also approaching the kind of coercion applied to members of the GAWU during the early years of its fight for recognition. There is the charge that management personnel have been “interviewing” – read ”pressuring” – workers in closed door meetings to agree to or sign a petition declaring loss of confidence in the existing union. As part owner, the government is implicated in this coercion. Has FITUG agents in RUSAL?
The statement of GuySuCo’s management that it will do as it likes with GuySuCo property regardless of protests by GAWU is more evidence that trade union rights in Guyana are in danger. Although they have been divided mainly by ‘politics,’ or rather party loyalty, both the GTUC and FITUG should perhaps jointly resolve whether they have a duty to denounce all acts of disrespect, arrogance, and all plantation tactics against organised working people, wherever they work. This kind of solidarity is basic trade union politics. This should be a requirement of the check-off system that unions defend workers’ interests. Under Mr Nanda Gopaul’s leadership, NAACIE would have taken a principled position.
GuySuCo property is, of course, ‘company’ property only by legal fiction. Although sugar workers have a prior interest in it, we have to declare that it is in fact the property of the citizens of Guyana that GuySuCo is planning to sell. Perhaps negotiations began long before the announcements, as GuySuCo has given out estimates of a possible price of the proposed Diamond sale.
I am well aware of the criticisms directed at columnist Freddie Kissoon of the Kaieteur News and others for their growing impatience with various forms of what must be called growing repression.
Columnist Kissoon has reminded us of what we should not, as people interested in good governance, ever forget, that is, the coup at the customs which the majority of Guyanese swallowed because the word ‘corruption’ was thrown into the campaign – and thrown by those whose loud words against corruption still echoed in the political air. People, like some of us who argue against the use of arms as a direct or indirect means of representation or argument, have earned the right to be laughed at as Guyana’s elected dictatorship brings back the old plantation style. It will be a healthy development if organised workers and the unions they finance can come to the point of defending trade union rights and workers’ right to a living wage as a priority regardless of the party they support.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
