Private sector wage earners, particularly those in factories and urban commercial enterprises face unacceptable levels of exploitation resulting from employers’ preoccupation with profit and “a complete lack of concern” with the welfare of their workers.
“That, unfortunately, is the way it is, not only here in Guyana but elsewhere in the Caribbean and no attention is being paid to the problem. Often there are issues that have to do with conditions of work, health and safety, hours of work and wages and salaries which are simply allowed to fall by the wayside,” General Secretary of the Guyana Trades Union Congress Lincoln Lewis told Stabroek Business in an interview earlier this week.
“It’s all about maximizing profit. You find that the downtown commercial houses tend to pay their workers the minimum wage and no more. Most of these workers are women; many of them come from distant places and sometimes what they work for is not even enough to pay their bus fares. Many, perhaps most of them are subsidized by family and friends. From a humanitarian standpoint we are talking about what in some cases is massive exploitation,” Lewis said.
And, according to Lewis, the current orientation of many of the country’s trade unions do not allow them to mount an effective response to what he says has become “a seriously exploitative situation” in some areas of the private sector. “Unfortunately, organizing in such a way as to protect non-unionized workers has never really been one of the real strengths of many trade unions in Guyana,” Lewis said.
Over time, some unions, most recently the General Workers Union (GWU) headed by GTUC President Norris Witter, have made efforts to organize workers employed in the urban commercial sector. Lewis explained that such initiatives can be “risky” since some employers have a strong anti-union position and would not hesitate to dismiss workers who are believed to be even entertaining the thought of becoming unionized. “When we are able to talk with some of the workers they readily admit that they are need of some kind of representation. Fear, however, prevents them from taking that step even when their rights are being trampled,” Lewis said.
Meanwhile, the GTUC General Secretary told Stabroek Business that the tri-partite collaboration which had drawn the labour movement and the private sector closer together more than ten years ago no longer exists. “In my view many of the private sector employers became concerned about their relationships with the government, for obvious reasons, and a point was reached where they began to distance themselves from labour. What that means is that there are now fewer formal avenues through which we can discuss issues that have to do with workers’ rights,” Lewis said. The GTUC General Secretary fears that much of the reason why the trade union movement is not taken seriously by employers has to do with its own internal crisis. He referred to a February 2011 meeting between the GTUC and the Private Sector Commission (PSC) to address a range of worker/employer issues in Guyana. “The meeting concluded on the note that we would hear from the PSC but so far we have not heard from them,” Lewis said.
And Lewis conceded that the divisions in the movement had seriously weakened labour and undermined its ability to protect the interests of workers in both the public and private sectors. “At the level of the Trade Union Recognition Board (TURB), for example, we sometimes have to deal with issues that have to do with employer transgression. “Funny enough, we find sometimes that vigorous representation of those issues often meets with much more resistance from other labour representatives on the Board than from employers’ representatives.” Both Lewis and Carvil Duncan, who heads the breakaway FITUG group, sit on the TURB.
