Ever since the Russian aluminum giant RUSAL ‘set up shop’ in Guyana in 2004 the company has made clear its discomfort with the industrial relations laws of Guyana, specifically those that afford employees of the Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc. (BCGI) in which they have a 90% stake, the right to be members of a trade union and more particularly, the right to take industrial action as and when they feel that management is not affording them a fair deal in one respect or another.
BCGI was established at a time when the country’s bauxite industry was seriously underperforming and when the government at the time was on the lookout for any reasonable external investment offer. It had even been suggested at the time of the advent of RUSAL that the company had ‘come to the rescue’ of the local bauxite industry.
Investment in those circumstances, however, is usually attended by conditions, some of which can be decidedly unpalatable and that is exactly how it has been with the Russian management at BCGI. There may have been a Collective Labour Agreement (CLA) signed with the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers Union (GB&GWU) at the outset though, thereafter, management’s treatment of the BCGI workers sent an unmistakable signal that it had no intention of honouring the clauses in the CLA that had to do with the rights of the workers and with its own obligations in that regard.
Just how much worse things have gotten over the years is reflected in the fact that management has no formal lines of communication with the union whatsoever. Union officials, save and except those that are employed by BCGI, are not allowed on company property and the company has shown no indication that it is desirous of re-negotiating a new CLA, the previous one having long expired.
As has been mentioned in numerous earlier media reports on the subject of the goings-on at BCGI, the RUSAL managers’ complete disregard for the principles of industrial relations, for the rights of its workers and for the union that represents them have become long-entrenched. The posture of BCGI’s management has also provided evidence of a blatant disregard for the laws of the land and for the authority of government. Over the years, government, perhaps out of a sense of concern that any attempt to ‘rock the boat’ may result in the loss of a foreign investor with all of the consequences that stem therefrom, has assumed the least line of resistance in its handling of union and worker protestations over the excesses of the BCGI management. Indeed, it may well be that it is government’s posture, over many years, that has given rise to the frequent ‘tantrums’ which the Russians insist on throwing.
So bad had the situation become that just over two years ago RUSAL officials flew to Guyana from the company’s headquarters and engaged both officials of the Department of Labour and officials of the GB&GWU. Those engagements were described by the union’s General Secretary Lincoln Lewis as ‘cordial” and “a good start” though he has long since conceded that there has been no improvement in the industrial relations climate, nor for that matter in the management’s treatment of the workers. If anything, he has told this newspaper, the situation has “become worse.”
Over the weekend, after the workers had received a one per cent pay increase without any prior negotiations, employees in the mines and maintenance departments took strike action. To no one’s surprise BCGI took its customary knee jerk action of closing down operations and, according to a GB&GWU media release, threatening the striking workers with dismissal. According to the union’s media release the company’s management, in the course of an engagement with the striking workers, defied them to “seek redress wherever they want” and declared “to hell with the government.”
Yesterday, as the strike rolled over into its first full week the situation began to assume bizarre proportions with Lewis notifying this newspaper that the Russian management had agreed to meet with the Department of Labour and the GB&GWU on the condition the he (Lewis) did not attend the meeting. In a brief exchange with this newspaper Lewis said that he intended to show up for the meeting though the pertinent question has to do with whether the Department of Labour would countenance the conditions for meeting allegedly set out by the BCGI management.
From an industrial relations standpoint, the environment at the BCGI work site continues to be tenuous, inhospitable and frequently, downright incendiary. And yet for all the dysfunctional environment at the work site, the GB&GWU, somehow, has kept in place a regimen of worker representation ‘managed’ by a handful of hardy workplace functionaries who function as an executive of sorts and who manage, at considerable disciplinary risk, to provide a modicum of representation for the wider group of workers. They do so in defiance of the Russian management’s refusal to engage the union at any level whatsoever and despite the fact that ‘outlawed’ as the union is at the work site, engagement in union-related pursuits can be deemed transgressions that could attract disciplinary action.
For its part, the GB&GWU has shifted much of its attention from the company, per se, its line of discourse on the industrial relations impasse having less to do with union/management relations and more to do with relations between the government and BCGI. The union contends that rather than use its authority to compel the Russian management of BCGI to respect the constitutional right of the workers to take industrial action, successive political administrations have simply looked the other way. The available evidence would appear not to challenge the union’s perspective.
As last weekend’s strike-driven shutdown of operations demonstrates, BCGI, from an industrial relations standpoint, lives continually ‘on the edge,’ there being – in the absence of a Collective Labour Agreement – no formal mechanism for regulating relations between employer and employees. The workers’ ‘take’ on last weekend’s work stoppage and management’s response is that it amounts to yet another audacious challenge to the country’s sovereignty to which government has a duty to respond with a far greater measure of assertiveness than they have, up to this time.
