The threatened city strike action has been put on the back burner since Guyana Labour Union General Secretary Carvil Duncan is now waiting to see if the Georgetown municipality will ‘stump up’ the second half of its last year’s debt to workers.
Duncan told Stabroek News that that he met with workers early yesterday morning and all of them said they finally received the half-month salaries owed to them as part of the one-off yearend payment and are of the view that the council might pay the balance before January 31.
“The workers have said that they have heard that they might get the other 50% early since the council would usually pay out leave passage assistance by the 15th and so they will wait and see if they will get it and then decide on their next step,” Duncan said.
Duncan threatened to proceed on strike action again if the workers had consented to it. The union had revealed its feeling that the council was now in a better position to pay the workers all the money due to them since it was able to secure an advance in taxes for the first quarter of this year from the government.
But Duncan charged that there was discrimination in the payment since the workers he represents were made to settle for half of the one-off payment, which some of them still had not received, while those workers represented by the Guyana Local Government Officers Union (GLGOU) had received all of their promised five per cent increase.
Mayor Hamilton Green had refuted this saying that the monies were distributed evenly to the workers represented by the two unions.
