Dear Editor,
There is absolutely no way that GuySuCo under the PPP will ever de-recognize GAWU. Not now or ever! Any such move would be political suicide for the PPP. Therefore, it is with great amusement that I am observing the industrial/political theatrics being played out currently between GuySuCo and GAWU.
This is an election year and many strange machinations will present themselves, leaving the less perceptive mind in awe and bewilderment. If by some strange means a bolt of enlightenment had struck the Guyanese sugar worker, resulting in him or her deciding that maybe a change in government might result in more effective, strategic managerial and business policies that would bring relief to the current sugar haemorrhaging being experienced by GuySuCo, it was quickly averted with GuySuCo’s ‘tactical’ de-recognition threat to GAWU.
I am very confident that the sugar workers will get their wage increase next year – even retroactively, whether or not GuySuCo can afford it. President Jagdeo will meet them at the International Convention Centre and will in his now established Big Brother fashion provide what will seem to be the only fix to this bitter sweet dilemma. Those who might have thought that the management of GuySuCo was about to turn off the life support of the PPP by de-recognizing GAWU, should be reminded that GuySuCo is a quasi-governmental organization which falls directly under the mandate of the Minister of Agriculture. The General Secretary of the PPP himself is a member of the GuySuCo Board of Directors. Unless there is some mortal split existing within the PPP’s central executive, there is no way that GAWU would be de-recognized. Comrade Moses Nagamootoo eloquently presented the historical connection between GAWU and its sugar workers to the PPP in the media. He described the umbilical cord that has bound these two institutions together through their many years of struggle for better wages and working conditions.
Moses did a wonderful job of jogging the memories of those who might have started to fall prey to various forms of amnesia. And for those not familiar with the history of sugar workers’ struggles, they got a valuable lesson.
I sincerely hope Guyanese, moreso the sugar workers, can differentiate a threat from a bluff.
Long live GAWU!
Yours faithfully,
Richard Francois
