The Federation of Indepen-dent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG) says the report of the Independent Expert on Minority issues, Gay McDougall is a document that “is objectionable and offensive to all fair-minded Guyanese and divisive in its conclusions,” which are flawed and based on inadequate consultations.
FITUG declared that the “perceived ethnic polarization being bandied by the expert is a product of either her own imagination or a willing acceptance of misinformation by well-known prophets of doom only too willing to see actual upheavals . . .”
FITUG said in a press release yesterday that it represents four premier trade unions with some 36,000 workers and is therefore the country’s largest representative entity, and it was therefore extremely disappointed that the Minority issues expert found that she “could not fit the country’s largest representative workers organization into her schedule.”
FITUG noted, however, that during her visit here between July 28 and August 1, 2008, she found time to visit opposition political parties and the village of Buxton.
According to FITUG, based on limited, selective interviews and very partisan documentation McDougall reported that the Bauxite Industry Pension Fund had been dismantled by government to deny former bauxite workers an adequate pension while injecting more than a billion dollars into a Guysuco pension. Apart from these being two blatant untruths, FITUG stated, government has been consistently subsidizing both the bauxite industry and social services for the residents of Linden.
FITUG also noted that McDougall was misled with respect to the Critchlow Labour College being established to meet the needs of Afro-Guyanese trade union leaders as well as concluding that discrimination was responsible for the withdrawal of the college’s annual subvention and not accountability or misappropriation.
Government withdrew the monthly $2.9 million subvention to the college from August 2007 and has not budgeted for it since. The CLC was established in 1967 to provide worker education and the college had been receiving a government subvention for decades.
Meanwhile, FITUG maintained that in terms of objective assessment the McDougall report does no credit to the UN and its human rights ideals and urged the UN Secretary-General to identify “experts who can be most absolutely objective when undertaking such sensitive tasks in societies that may be alien to them.”
