Over 400 sugar workers staged a protest early yesterday morning at Plantation Diamond after GuySuCo failed to respond to a letter seeking severance pay for the workers who are to be transferred to other areas.

The protest saw more than 200 workers from Plantation Diamond and about the same number from the La Bonne Intention (LBI) Estate gathered on the East Bank of Demerara just after 5 am. The strike is to continue today and the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) is conducting a series of meetings to discuss their next move if GuySuCo (Guyana Sugar Corporation) continues to ignore the workers.

Shiv Narine, a Junior Estate staffer and a union representative, told Stabroek News that they have since sought the help of sister union NAACIE (National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees). It was the two unions which wrote to GuySuCo about the severance pay issue.

“Once the workers get the severance pay they will seek employment elsewhere,” Narine stated.

According to the March 23 letter addressed to the corporation, and obtained by Stabroek News, the unions are seeking to have some 400 workers attached to the estate provided with severance pay, since “their permanent deployment to work on other locations at distances away would be onerous and inhibit their productivity and earnings.” The unions jointly stated that a cost-cutting measure which they have discussed is the linking of the Diamond, LBI and Enmore plantations, to save on the transportation of canes from Diamond to the two East Coast Demerara estates.

The unions believe that the Diamond estate remains ideally suited for sugar cane cultivation, and according to them, in light of the need to have a vast supply of canes for the production of some 80,000 tonnes of packaged sugar at the Enmore Estate, maintenance of the Diamond Estate, “would save the corporation millions of dollars to occupy new lands which may not be as equally productive.”

GAWU again reiterated their position on the closing of the Diamond Plantation in a press release yesterday afternoon.

The release said: “The Corporation, ignoring the Union, is advancing the closure process as it is merely reaping the existing canes and not doing an iota to facilitate new cane growth. The Union, in the circumstances, fully supports the workers in their bid to be paid their severance pay in keeping with the extant Collective Labour Agreement.”

The deployment of the workers to the East Coast Demerara Estates, GAWU said, will rob the workers of their pay-off benefits noting that many of them will either immediately or gradually opt out of the employ of the corporation once they are permanently deployed to the East Coast Estates.