Dear Editor,
Stabroek News (‘Sacrifices have to be made by GuySuCo, sugar workers,’ November 29) reports that in an article in the Mirror newspaper, PPP General Secretary Donald Ramotar, after explaining the history of confrontation in the sugar industry beginning with slavery and indenture, added “Now we have a new dispensation with a government sympathetic to the working people. However, the centuries of confrontational relations between management and workers will not disappear in a day. We are experiencing a transitional hangover from our history” (my emphasis).
In other words, the expressed grievances of the sugar workers are not grounded in their present reality. Life is good and they’re striking only because sugar workers have a habit of striking.
The angle you look from determines what you see. Obviously, I don’t speak with any direct knowledge of what sugar workers are seeing, but I think it is fair to assume that they, like all those who are struggling to survive on no wages or low wages or seasonal wages, see life differently from Mr Ramotar. In my lifetime, Guyana has never had the level of visible, conspicuous inequality that it has now – not in the colonial period, not under the Burnham and Hoyte administrations both of which I opposed, not under Cheddi Jagan. In relation to Dr Jagan, whatever anyone’s criticisms of him, an ostentatious flaunting of wealth and privilege was never associated with him.
There are many commentators in Guyana who only see the inequalities of race, never those of gender or class. Because of who the sugar workers are and because of their historical allegiance to the PPP, they are raising issues about class privilege and class exploitation that are easier to see than when other sectors of workers rebel. Perhaps Mr Ramotar would need to go about the country in disguise to hear firsthand the deep resent-ment of the present levels of inequality between haves and have-nots in our country that pervades all sectors of those without access to the Pradovilles of Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Andaiye
