While the public has been labouring under the impression that the government’s bargaining agent with the Guyana Teachers’ Union on a multi-year pay package for teachers was the Ministry of Education, it has now been revealed that this is not so. The clarification was made by Minister of Education Priya Manickchand a few days ago, when she said that the Ministry had never negotiated on this matter, it was dealt with at the level of the Office of the President. At least that provided some explanation, although hardly a justification, for why President Irfaan Ali should have inserted himself into the story, and indicated his intention of trekking around the country asking teachers what they wanted. As had already been pointed out last week, other objections aside, this is hardly the most practicable of approaches to the matter of bargaining on pay rises.
However well-meaning President Ali might be, a grasp of the principles of administration does not appear to be included in his management arsenal. He is, in other words, something of a micromanager. He moves around the country from region to region listening to people’s problems and solving them immediately where he can, and arranging to solve them when he can’t. There he was in Region Three a few months ago, for example, resolving 1,700 issues on the spot, and making arrangements for the resolution of almost 2,000 others.
While there is nothing wrong with meeting the people, direct action on their complaints as a regular standard operating procedure is not the way to govern a country. At the very minimum it highlights the fact that government is not working, and by extension it also exposes the fact that reform of the administration to make it work is not on the agenda. The truth is that it is simply not possible for one man to run a state by listening to a plethora of individual problems and ordering them to be put right. If the departments and agencies are not functioning now, they will do even worse once they know all queries and complaints are going to be directed to the head of state alone. And all such issues will go to him alone because everyone will believe that he is the only person who can fix things. In the process it certainly makes the President very popular, and shifts the blame for things which go wrong to those around him.
And now he is about to apply the same tactic to the teachers. This time, however, the situation is very different, even although he does not seem to recognize this. It is one thing to bypass a government department while pursuing relief for ordinary citizens, but it is quite another to use the technique to sidestep an independent body with legal powers to represent a certain category of workers. To refuse to deal with it and go over its head to appeal to the workers it represents, is not just to show contempt for the union, but also for the workers involved.
The teachers pay the GTU regular dues to represent them, and one can only suppose it is President Ali’s strategy to waste their money and make it irrelevant by dealing directly with the teachers all the time. What this means in practice is that what he ultimately intends to do is impose an across-the-board increase. Where the public service unions are concerned this has become an ingrained habit with PPP/C governments.
But what happens, for example, if on his peregrinations some teachers ask the President things he doesn’t want to hear, such as why isn’t he talking to their union? Is he going to tell them he doesn’t like the GTU’s politics? One presumes he would avoid this considering that there is a substantial number of Africans in the teaching profession. He would perhaps respond along the lines that the union is not negotiating in good faith or representing them well, or some such. In a society such as this which breathes politics that would not be taken at face value.
Perhaps some teachers would not choose to meet him, and he would hear mostly from those who support him, as well as those who given his outreach performances in the regions believe he will give them what they ask. If the across-the-board payment does not then come up to their expectations and is not near or even above what the GTU has put forward, then he will have seriously damaged his reputation and could not repeat the exercise the next time around. Furthermore, if the figure is close to what the union requested, the teachers will see his stratagem for what it is: a manoeuvre to weaken their union.
That apart, It was union General Secretary Coretta McDonald who drew attention to a fundamental contradiction in the President’s position, namely that the government had already said it had a comprehensive package for teachers, so if that was the case why was it necessary for the head of state to go around asking teachers what they wanted. This appeared to be further confirmation that the administration was just looking for a route to impose an across-the-board payment.
The President’s attitude to the union reflects his government’s position on not dealing with the opposition at any level. It is a tiresome and counterproductive approach, which does nothing to repair the divisions in the society, and in the longer term will only make matters worse. The GTU is perceived by Freedom House as a tool of the opposition, more especially since its General Secretary, became an APNU MP. Even if, for the sake of argument, the union had political links, that would not mean that it was not negotiating in good faith on behalf of the teachers. As it is, it has been very consistent over the years in terms of the format of its demands, and Ms McDonald has said that the union’s package was the product of countrywide consultation with the teachers.
President Ali simply cannot deny that unionism in this country has been very politicised, and that the most political of unions has always been Gawu, with its decades-long links to the PPP. What is the head of state telling the teachers? That he would only negotiate with a union which was a clone of Gawu? The President’s Office has certainly been going through the motions of meeting the GTU; there has, apparently, been more than one meeting. The first of these took place towards the end of April, when three government ministers met with the executive of the GTU and a multi-year pact, among other things, was discussed. The identity of the three ministers who met the union on behalf of the President was interesting: they were Ms Manickchand, Minister of Governance and Parliamentary Affairs Gail Teixeira and Minister of the Public Service Sonia Parag. No one there, it might be noted, from Finance. Considering that nothing has come out of these meetings and the President wants to negotiate with the teachers himself, one has to conclude they were not undertaken in good faith.
The President has another problem. This country is a signatory to any number of ILO conventions, while the government has always prided itself on being a workers’ party. A cursory look at the ILO website in relation to Guyana shows that all those which have been signed are “In force”. Clearly certain articles are not. Perhaps President Ali and his government might like to refresh their memory on some of these.
