Mostly for the wrong reasons, the majority-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) has been in the news fairly frequently in recent weeks. Much of the reporting has had to do with the outlook of the company’s Russian management in matters pertaining particularly to the welfare and well-being of the workers and aspects of its safety and health regime. The views of the Russian company RUSAL in matters of labour relations and the treatment of workers would appear to be as different from those that apply here, under the law, as chalk is from cheese.
Over time, too, the company’s Russian bosses have assumed an uncompromising anti-union posture, challenging what is, in fact, the constitutional right of Guyanese workers to be affiliated to a trade union of their choice.
Recently, this newspaper referred to a visit to BCGI’s operations late last year by Minister Simona Broomes; the outcome of which was not only a pretty damning report on aspects of the company’s operations, but a condemnation of the company’s recalcitrance and intransigence in the matter of engaging the union, the Guyana Bauxite & General Workers Union (GB&GWU), with which there is an existing but non-functioning Collective Labour Agree-ment.
Some additional points should be made here. First, the essentially lawless posture on union representation struck by BCGI is taking place even as the company is being advised on matters of labour relations by a former Guyana Chief Labour Officer, Mr Mohammed Akeel. Secondly, in the face of BCGI’s bullyism the GB&GWU has not been even nearly as militant as it ought to have been even though we are informed that at BCGI workers assume even the slightest trace of union-driven militancy at the risk of various forms of victimization including, on occasion, dismissal. The third thing of course is that the government can hardly pretend not to be fully briefed on the situation at BCGI.
This newspaper has had reports of frequent knee-jerk resort to draconian behaviour on the part of the BCGI’s Russian bosses. Last week, we met with a section of a group of 50-odd workers who were allegedly wrongfully dismissed en masse several months ago. Some of them including those with families are still struggling to make ends meet. We have seen a letter signed by one of the Russian managers requiring workers to remain off the job and without pay until a piece of equipment which they (the management) themselves concede is faulty has been repaired.
If there can be no doubt that the problem that BCGI has become was incubated during the tenure of the previous political administration, that does not remove from the shoulders of the present administration the responsibility to treat with it and to do so at a much greater pace than is the case at this time. There is a school of thought that appears to be gaining ground in our country which places a premium on foreign investment, going as far as suggesting that core labour standards and workers’ rights can be traded off in exchange for foreign investment. That notion had actually been publicly articulated during the period towards the latter part of last year when the then Minister in the Ministry of Social Protection, Simona Broomes appeared to be going after the indiscretions of employers in some sectors.
Concerns are now being expressed that the present administration has been taking far too long to respond to what is now widely believed to be irrefutable evidence that BCGI embraces an anti-worker management policy. In fact, just a matter of days ago, the General Secretary of the Guyana Trades Union Congress Lincoln Lewis told this newspaper that the BCGI management had once again refused to meet with the union to create an environment in which it can effectively represent the interests of the workers. That, surely, has to be the last straw!
What all this comes down to is the obligation which the Government of Guyana has to set the Russian management of BCGI straight on the laws of the land in the matter of trade union representation. Beyond that, the concerns that have been articulated about the treatment of employees at BCGI not only by the workers but, of late, by a minister of government, places government in a position where it now has no choice but to frontally engage the Russians at BCGI on the labour standards expected of it. If it is that there is a view – wherever that view might exist – that labour standards should be compromised in deference to foreign investors, that view is not one which the workers of this country should ever accept, no matter the quarter from which it comes. RUSAL must not become a template for other foreign investors.
