Dear Editor,
In the usual Guyanese debate over ‘who bun down de Ministry’ we are keeping our eyes open to see whether the security guards will be made scapegoats. We don’t know what happened at the Ministry of Health, but if questions are going to be raised about the “negligence” of the guards the public should ask under what conditions they were working, and why the government is subcontracting to private security firms which are not required by law to meet minimum standards of decent work instead of employing the guards directly as public sector employees.
Unlike male security guards who are often older and/or retired men because their labour is cheaper than that of younger men, women security guards are often mothers of young children. These are women who have more expenses, but who are attractive to the employers precisely because they can be paid less since their responsibility for children forces them to accept conditions that men of their age would reject.
And what conditions! Security guard work is like domestic work – if you don’t find a “good boss” there are no rules at all. One of the signatories to this letter used to work as a security guard and years later still rages that, “I work at a private home where the employers – high-up people – send me to pick peppers, clean dog mess, fetch gas bottles upstairs, roll a spare wheel to change a punctured tire. Was like the job din have no job description.”
The conditions of work create unnecessary risk. Women security guards often have little say over which shifts they will work although at night they are more vulnerable to sexual and other physical violence. Patricia Rose and Simone Coleridge, two women guards, were murdered on the job this year alone. There is a woman who told us of being beaten unconscious by a thief. Most don’t have a simple baton to try to defend themselves with. Many have no walkie-talkie or even a whistle to call for help although they so often work alone. There was a site on Camp Street about a year ago which had no sanitary facilities for women so one of the two guards would be left alone while the other went to a toilet nearby.
Hours of work can be brutal. Among present and former woman guards we talked to, one said “You have to work seven days a week to get one day off. If you are at a location and the person do not come to relieve you, you have to work through. If you are working at a location you have sometimes to carry two shift before you are relieve and in some critical time you don’t even get to go home till three days. You would only have to try to bathe right there. If you have some friendly supervisor they will see that you get relieve early or they will book more hours for you but of course you have to give them something.” It doesn’t matter if you are a woman who has young children to get back to; you work when you are told for as long as you’re told.
Pay and arrangements for uniforms and leave can be just as savage. We received a report of a workplace where some women guards thought they’d received T shirts as part of their entitlement, but found out next payday that the equivalent of 20 hours pay had been deducted from each of their small wages. One woman, still on the job, said she has to work weekends and holidays without double pay. If she is sick she gets no time off with pay. She has to pay for her own uniform. She gets no annual leave with pay, no benefits at all. Still another said that when she worked for four years with a private firm that was mostly contracted by ministries, regular shifts were eight hours or 12 hours day or night but could last as long as 24 hours because, “she (the boss of the firm) don’t have guard.” The pay was $75 an hour, $900 for 12 hours. No NIS was paid, the boss would refuse days off, and they were not given maternity leave or double pay for Sundays and public holidays.
As against this, of the three private security firms we checked, two charge the client $260 an hour for an unarmed guard and $340 and $360 an hour respectively for an armed guard, while the third charges $300 an hour for an unarmed guard and $500 an hour for an armed guard. Moreover, while many guards get the same rate on Sundays and public holidays, the firms’ fee is double on those days.
Women guards explain that they take this work, even where they face unbearable conditions, even when they are afraid, because that is the work they can get, because they have a choice between that and domestic work which is worse paid, or because they need to top up the small wages they receive from their day jobs. When she conducted a study of the private security industry ten years ago Alissa Trotz found that several women guards were teachers.
Since one of Red Thread’s main priorities is living incomes for women, security guards and domestic workers are among the women we work with – because both often operate in work places where massa and mistress day definitely not done, where employers, whether they are the agencies which contract them or those who run the institutions and homes to which they are sent, behave as though they have no rights. One fine, upstanding citizen used to throw water on her guards to make sure they kept awake. A guard at a private house in Brickdam had to sit on a bench outside the fence, with no shade.
We have heard of heads of security firms boasting about the high number of women and men they employ, and somewhere in the boast there is a threat that if they have to pay better wages and provide decent conditions they will have to employ fewer guards. And they get away with it because security guards, like domestic workers, are outside the concern of trade unions, even though a lot of the unacceptable excuses they use to avoid representing domestic workers do not apply to security guards, who do not work individually in private homes but are employees on the regular payroll of presumably legitimate firms. Security guards also seem to be outside the concern of the Ministry of Labour.
They are visible only when they get killed or when their “negligence” is to be blamed for the mysterious burning down of a ministry.
The basic, underlying demand of Red Thread is that all women’s work, unwaged and waged, must be recognized and valued and properly remunerated.
The least that the Ministry of Labour must do is to begin to act immediately to ensure that the laws that apply to workers in the public sector be extended to the private sector. While the wages and conditions of work for women in the public sector are not good enough, the wages and conditions of work in parts of the private sector – including in parts of the security guard industry – are criminal.
Yours faithfully,
Andaiye,
Wintress White,
Joycelyn Bacchus,
Shirley Shafeek
Red Thread and
Guyanese Women Across Race