Once you understand the ebb and flow in the fortunes of Guyana’s public servants in their unending quest for better wages and, by extension, a higher standard of living, the paucity of the turnout for the December 20 protest march would have been entirely unsurprising.
Poor pay is an occupational hazard of opting to work for the traditional public service, so much so that the avenues for graft and corruption in public sector entities that include, notably, the revenue-collecting state agencies, are widely seen as compensating for jobs that otherwise offer little more than long-term impoverishment.
The now routine five per cent end-of-year handout that passes for an annual salary increase persists to the chagrin of the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) and to the political administration’s overwhelming shame. Indeed, there is something cynical about the fact that the paltry yuletide stipend has remained in place, successive years of official bragging about how well the country’s economy has performed, notwithstanding. Frankly, one is left to wonder whether the government’s sustained refusal to do something meaningful about the wages of its own employees does not amount to a payback for 1999, the year in which a strike by public servants that lasted for more than 50 days yielded the Armstrong Arbitration Tribunal and attendant salary increases in excess of 35 per cent and 25 per cent for 1999 and 2000, respectively.
The ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal of 14 years ago had enraged the seven-year-old PPP/C government which had earlier declared the GPSU’s industrial action to be a political strike designed to destabilize its administration, a claim which its own then Labour Minister, Dr Henry Jeffrey, subsequently dismissed.
A far more reasonable interpretation of the 1999 strike was that it had been an opportunistic move by public servants designed to regain ground that they had lost long before the PPP/C took office in 1992. That appeared to matter little to a political administration that had unleashed disruptive tirades of hostility against the public service manifested in witch hunts targeting state employees deemed to have been close enough to the outgoing administration to become threats to the incumbent one. In those days public servants could anticipate forms of targeting that included spiteful attempts to deny terminated public officers their benefits.
By the time the strike of 1999 came along the seeds of hostility between the political administration and its public servants had already been fertilized in soil rich with the rancour of the post-1992 reprisals and the frustration that had arisen out of earlier failed attempts by the union to secure a meaningful salary increase through the vehicle of negotiations with the new government.
Fourteen years after its historic 1999 triumph the GPSU was unable to muster more than a handful of public servants for its December 20 protest. The union has become severely diminished mostly on account of a destructive internal upheaval, the roots of which lie in an internal power struggle. For its part, the government had succeeded in altering public servants’ appetite for protest through measures ranging from the sidelining of ‘delinquents’ to contriving ways of removing those who insisted on their right to take industrial action from the system altogether. Serving public servants still testify to what they say has been a purge that has virtually crippled the union at the level of its branches.
The upshot of all this is that, these days, the GPSU is sorely lacking in the industrial relations muscle to secure the gains which it seeks for its members, so that the December 20 demonstration was never really likely to attract public servants in numbers anywhere near those that took to the streets in 1999.
Still, the handful of public servants who took to the streets on December 20 would have provided government with a sobering reminder that official efforts to kill off protest and to cause public servants to settle into a cocoon of either contentment or resignation have not entirely succeeded.
In one sense it is a lesson for the union that there is work to be done to continue to rekindle the belief of public servants in the justness of their quest for better pay. More than that, a point has surely now been reached where the GPSU must ask itself whether its continued relevance and perhaps more importantly, its continued effectiveness, does not now seriously repose in the kind of soul-searching that raises questions about leadership succession.
On the other hand and with hindsight, the December 20 protest ought to have reminded government that quixotic paranoia about industrial action being a Trojan horse for political subterfuge is just the kind of nonsense that will cause it to continue to fail to recognize that to continue to apply a regimen of demeaning annual ‘increments’ that re-enforces the pauperization of public servants is to run the considerable risk of, eventually, watching history repeat itself.
