Dear Editor,
When I saw the SN July 16, 2021 letter captioned `DDL willing to award an increase of 6% on basic salary for five years’, my immediate thought was that it was an ill-conceived and poorly written PR statement by the Company. And so it was with a sense of shock and despair that I realised that the writer of the letter was no less a person than the President of the Clerical and Commercial Workers’ Union, one of the unions representing the workers of that company.
In an evolving economy anything more than two years without a Cost-of-Living adjustment is one year too long. The leadership of the CCWU appears unmindful of the impact of inflation on workers especially, not only for the next five years but for the current year as well. Even before the impact of the current flooding, the official inflation rate between May 2021 and May 2020 was 3.8%, and higher in the case of food items. I can only feel sorry for the poor employees – pun intended – of DDL whose salaries are well below the non-taxable allowances and perquisites of many senior employees of that company, a situation not unlike the public sector as well.
The DDL management can hardly be said to be treating its employees fairly and responsibly while boasting of the company’s “excellent results” in the year of the COVID–19 pandemic. Indeed, with a 42% growth in the company’s after-tax profit, the results are excellent – from a shareholders’ point of view. It is unclear whether the Union bothered to familiarise itself with this not inconsequential matter, or indeed any other matter relevant to its duty to promote and protect the interest of its membership. While workers were getting an annual 5% increase in the five-year negotiation period which has just ended, shareholders received a return on their funds averaging 16.7%! In cash terms, over the past five years, shareholders received $3.418 billion by way of dividends on the $1.260 billion actually invested by them. On top of that actual return of cash, shareholders have seen the value of their holding of a single share move from $24 in 2016 to $125 today, an astronomical annual average of 84%.
Just for the record, the earnings of the employee are subject to tax. By contrast, neither the dividends nor the capital gains of the shareholders, even if realised, are subject to tax.
An annual increase of 6% on basic, not gross pay, to workers whose pay may include other elements such as commission and/or allowance, is less than 6% per annum. But even if it was on total pay, a 6% increase before inflation, to already low-paid workers would mean that at best, those workers would be no better off five years from now than they currently are. That this is taking place in one of Guyana’s top companies reflects disgracefully not only to the incompetent union leadership but to the unconscionable company leadership as well.
If this was an isolated incident or reflective of a single union, it would be bad enough. Sadly, this is not the case. Such a condition, almost without exception, is common among all the country’s unions with the GPSU perhaps the worst example of the harm caused by incompetence, poor leadership and weak governance structures. In the absence of adequate leadership of the unions, employers will continue to use such weaknesses to exploit their workers, both in the private and public sector.
May I be permitted Editor, to make an unrelated point. The DDL’s 2020 annual report contains less useful information than its report of ten years earlier when the Sunday Stabroek had a feature On the Line analysing the annual reports of public companies. This 2020 annual report makes good stuff for robust analysis.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
