A lost decade for the working class

Dear Editor,

“How can they borrow to pay some privileged elite and not pay the ordinary employees?” asked Christopher Ram in 2004, when he was exposing the US$15,000 (G$3 million) per month salary of an advisor to President Jagdeo. The sad fact is that in 2010, some of these people are still in the system with one US dollar presidential assistant travelling the world compliments of the Guyanese taxpayer doing the President’s work on the LCDS.

There are two things wrong about this system:

1.  A local should have been trained up under this super-salaried expat to take over at a more reasonable salary package.

2.  How can we pay one person so much money to do a job, when even the international agencies would not pay such a person this rate?

This is not what the PPP was elected to do. Reading one of the PAC bulletins from 1948, Dr Cheddi Jagan wrote about a system used by the plantocracy that made workers into “waged slaves” and his ambition at that time was ensure a greater share of the wealth being channelled to the working class.  The above clearly shows the radical transformation of his inheritors. There is a new bourgeois class in Guyana, which is milking the state for their friends and cronies, leaving the masses with the crumbs.

In 1946, we had Sir FJ Seaford, Chairman of Bookers, who sucked all surplus value from the workers to pay himself and his cronies and his absentee capitalist to live the life in London.  Today we have Jagdeo telling the workers to “pull their weight” as he did at the GAWU Congress in 2009.  However the same Jagdeo is offering his advisors and his assistants close to a million each in monthly super salaries.  It is shameful that the Jagdeo regime imposed a 3% salary increase on the sugar workers and a 6% on the public servants when they were asking for 12%.  These same workers have to toil to generate the taxes to pay these millions to the advisors.  How different is the ruling class today from Bookers?

In May 1999, the then Finance Minister Bharrat Jagdeo stated in the Guyana Chronicle  that the GPSU demand for a 40 per cent pay hike was unrealistic.  Why?  Because in his words, “more than 60 per cent of revenue in 1998 was spent on servicing debts and 28 per cent of revenue was paid to public servants.”  According to the GC, he said “if the Government agreed to a 40 per cent pay increase, we’d be spending about 105 per cent of revenue on wages and salaries and servicing debts [alone].” This was the advice provided to President Janet Jagan by her Finance Minister in 1999.

Less than 4 months later in September 1999, the former Finance Minister Jagdeo, now President Jagdeo made a classic volte-face and stated “my Government will honour the award in respect of wages and salaries for 1999 and 2000.”  The award we are speaking about is the one handed down by the Armstrong Commission which saw public servants getting a 31.06% increase for 1999 and 26.67% for 2000 based on the December 31, 1999 wage rates.  That is an aggregate of more than 59% combined salary increase for the workers at that time.  Well, well, 40% was unrealistic in May 1999 and but by some magic 59% was possible in September 1999, less than 4 months later.  One of the main reasons for the uproar against President Janet Jagan was “her inability” to meet the wages and salaries expectation of the GPSU, but she acted based on advice provided to her by her finance team.  I trust the reading public is seeing the picture now.

Providing statistics, Minister Jagdeo pointed out in May 1999 that the Janet Jagan administration spent 28% of the total revenue on wages and salaries in 1998.  Have public servants fared any better with subsequent budgets?  The 2010 budget highlighted the fact that the government spent 28% of total revenue on wages and salaries in 2009  (computed from Page 67 of the 2010 Budget).

The argument used for not paying public servants more in 1998 was that 60% of the revenue earned was used to pay debt cost.  That made sense then, since you should never borrow to pay salaries.  However in the 2010 budget, 8% of the total revenue earned in 2009 was used to service debt, an 86% reduction in debt cost as compared to 1998.

Where did all these savings go?  Capital works of course!  The extra cash was not given to the working class; it was a tsunami of funds for infrastructure works that just fuelled corruption and exacerbated the fundamental problem in Guyana – the expanding gap between the rich and the poor.

What has happened to the working class?  They got what President Janet Jagan provided to them in 1998 – 28% of the revenue stream. This is a principle indicator as to why the gap between the rich and the poor has expanded since 2000.  None of the debt savings was spent on the working class. This was a lost decade for the working class. This was the decade of the ruling class and their friends.  This is one of the issues that the AFC has to marshal in exposing the covert oppression being perpetrated on the working class.

Workers need to be told what is going on; workers need to have access to the truth; workers must be made aware of the methodology that is being used to subjugate them; while they pay for the high life of a few.

It all started in Enmore in 1948 and in 2011, it is Enmore that will decide whether Guyana frees itself or not.

Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh