-authorities must move to rein in offenders, rescue abused guards

Stabroek Business Editor Arnon Adams examines aspects of the crisis facing guards employed by private security firms and the need for government to take steps to check the excesses

On the day that I spoke with Candace she was exhausted, angry and famished. She was half way into her second 12-hour shift and responded to my enquiry about the likelihood of being relieved soon with a shrug of her shoulders. She said she had grown used to “back to back” shifts and that she “wouldn’t mind so much” if she were fully compensated for the extra hours. She said that just before I arrived she had been thinking about her two children, a girl and a boy aged seven and three, respectively and how they were faring during her protracted absence from home.

I spoke with her at the location where she was on duty. It was a clandestine exchange, briefer than we both would have liked. Candace was wary of the possibility that our conversation might somehow reach the ears of her bosses and she spoke with me her eyes turned mostly in the direction of the open door leading to the office. We talked casually as though I were a visitor seeking directions to a particular office.  She told me that she used to be an assistant in a small snackette and had become a security guard about a year ago after the owner of the business migrated.

After she told me about her near 24-hour vigil I asked her about the logistics of securing a bath and a change of clothing.  She responded with a shy smile that suggested that she was not about to discuss what she clearly deemed to be an intensely personal issue. I knew beforehand of those cases in which guards forced to work beyond their normal shifts would wash and dry their clothing on the premises. The office staff understood and accommodated the guards in this demeaning practice.

Women are believed to comprise more than 50 per cent of the collective strength of guard services. The predominance of female security guards is usually attributed to the fact that women have proven to be both more reliable and more malleable. They are, in most cases, more in need of the job and much more prepared to endure its rigours and indignities.

Candace told us that two of her sisters also worked as security guards with another guard service. All three are single parents with no other means of support.  She said that she was hopeful that she would receive her salary for January before the end of the month. She had received her previous month’s salary at the end of the first week in January and had already incurred debts that exceeded the extent of her next remuneration. Late pay, she told me, was a common occurrence at the guard service where she worked. “I never really expect to get paid on time,” she told me.

I asked her about the payment of her NIS contributions. The guard service for which she works is one of those owing the Scheme tens of millions of dollars in employee contributions. Efforts by the NIS to secure payment has led to a protracted court battle which, NIS officials say, has a ‘wearing down’ effect. The owners of the guard services that are hauled before the courts know only too well that the wheels of justice turn slowly, allowing more than enough time for a business, if necessary, to go into liquidation and evade the debt altogether.

Candace told me that she had never had reason to check on the status of her NIS payments. By that she meant that she had never had cause to make a claim for benefits. She admitted that she sometimes worried about what she would find if and when she had reason to engage the Scheme. But there were other more pressing concerns that pushed the NIS issue further towards her mental back burner. Her current concern is with being able to afford to send her children back to school.

She told me that her children had spent the first week of the new term at home and that they would return when she can afford to send them. Until that time comes they remain in the care of a neighbour whom she said she trusted.

The appearance of an office official at a door close to the guard hut where she was speaking to me brought the interview to an abrupt end. Loud enough for the ‘intruder’ to hear, I volunteered my thanks for her “help” in giving me “directions” and made my way into the building to complete the deception.
Low-level service

Most guard services in Guyana offer a low-level service that is confined to placing Baton and Armed Guards on premises. The transition to the kind of costly high tech security regime warranted in an environment of serious crime has been slow. Frankly, some guard services could not afford the investment and even if they could they have no incentive to go in that direction. While several of the country’s leading private sector entities have pressed electronic alarms, cameras and other current technology into service and tend to recruit the high-end guard services for cash-related transactions, the lesser equipped outfits that offer the more mundane services appear to be preferred by government. Ministries, hospitals,   health centres, schools and regional administrative offices are among the locations tended by the ‘regular’ guard services. These are generally regarded as low-risk sites and the recent destruction by fire of the Ministry of Health, believed to have been an act of arson appears, at least in some cases, not to have altered that perception.

Cumulatively, government contracts awarded to the less well-appointed guard services to secure the scores of state premises in the country’s ten administrative regions are worth tens of millions of dollars. The decision in 2000 to award the lion’s share of the state security contracts to the United Associates Security and Domestic Services (UAS&DS) a firm established by two trade unions – the Union of Allied and Agricultural Workers (UAAW) and the National Union of Public Service Employees (NUPSE) – specifically to administer those contracts is now widely   regarded as having backfired spectacularly. By 2005, government had moved to reduce the company’s near monopoly of state sites amidst widespread allegations of fraudulent practices including the ‘padding’ of payrolls with ‘ghost’ guards, failure to allocate to sites the numbers of guards agreed in the contracts and persistent complaints both to the Ministry of Labour and the media by security guards of protracted delays in the payment of salaries and various schemes including disciplinary ruses to cut their pay.  Today, with their hold on even the handful of sites still under their control under threat, what was once universally regarded as the most officially favoured private guard service in Guyana has all but collapsed under the weight of mismanagement, a mountain of debts and difficulties associated with being unable to bid for state contracts on account of its inability to secure GRA and NIS Certificates of Compliance.

Driven it seems by greed and avarice, some security services have devised ‘scams’ to bolster their control of the market that go beyond the exploitation of guards. A few years ago the state tender administration was compelled to respond to a rash of forged NIS and GRA compliances submitted by some guard services in support of bids for state contracts. Heavily indebted to the two agencies and unable to legitimately secure Certificates of Compliance from these agencies, the guard services simply resorted to submitting forged Certificates of Compliance in support of their bids. At the same time rumours of corrupt transactions involving the Guard Services and functionaries within the NIS and the GRA which enabled them to secure proper compliances, their huge outstanding liabilities notwithstanding, surfaced.  A system of scrupulous checks involving the Ministry of Finance and the two agencies appear to have closed this particular loophole.

Complaints persist, however, of schemes designed to exploit security guards. This newspaper has learnt of cases in which pay incentives originally built into pay agreements are arbitrarily withdrawn for the flimsiest reasons. Additionally, whereas two guards working two separate shifts are each   entitled to full pay, there are cases in which a single guard   who works two consecutive shifts receives only a fraction of the pay for the second shift. The remaining amount, originally factored into the agreement with the client is retained by the company.

Female guards, understandably, suffer most. Allegations of   sexual harassment by male supervisors are frequent. Much of this reportedly derives from blackmail-type arrangements under which the predatory supervisors would agree to ignore lateness and absences by female guards – which, if taken account of would result in disciplinary action that includes suspension and loss of pay – in exchange for sexual favours.

Terrified over penalties that would result in the lessening of their already meagre wages, many of the women reportedly ensure the ordeal for protracted periods. I had asked Candace about the issue of sexual harassment and the various other challenges that female security guards had to face. She said that she had never experienced unwanted sexual advances but that her younger sister had.

The report to the company, she said, had been dismissed by its male management on the grounds that her sister had simply been trying to “get at” a supervisor who had reported her for sleeping at her post. Candace said that she felt that the sacrifices which female security guards had to make had far more to do with the fact that, as a whole, “men run things” in the sector. She said that in her own case she was worried that her children are compelled to suffer the consequences of her doing a job which she had no appetite for but had little choice but to endure.

The Ministry of Labour has been less than forthcoming about its response to the mountain of complaints by security guards against their employers though there are reported cases of some issues being resolved.

At the moment the Ministry is serving as a go-between in a dispute between the UAS&DS and some of its former guards who were dismissed but not paid either their outstanding salaries or their benefits. The arrangement between the Guard Service and the Ministry of Labour is that the sums owing to the guards be passed to the Ministry by the company for payment.

There is a widespread belief that the problems facing security guards and the excesses of some of their employers are receiving less than warranted attention on the part of the authorities. The plight of impoverished, exploited women like Candace deserves far more focused attention by the Labour and Human Services Ministry, a state agency that persistently professes its concern for worker welfare and the welfare of women and children. Meanwhile, a far greater measure of attention ought to be paid to bringing an end to the various thoroughly unacceptable moral and legal transgressions perpetrated by rogue Guard Services without consequence.