One of the most important ongoing social struggles in this country is the fight for a minimum wage that will allow workers and their families, especially single-parent households, to live at a minimally decent standard. Successive PPP/C administrations often preach about the benefits of hard work yet many who work hard can barely survive.
For many years, the struggle against economic injustices in our society has been waged by the labour movement, the women’s movement, and ordinary workers pressing for decent work, improved conditions and fair pay. Last year, workers continued the campaign across our cane fields, hospitals and in the streets – from industrial action and protest marches to weekly picketing exercises.
The minimum wage here is economically depressing. Deep internal struggles and fading solidarity within our once robust labour movement has left workers economically vulnerable and exposed in an environment of climbing living costs and rising unemployment.
The main asset of the majority of the citizenry is their labour, from the seasonal employees toiling in our cane fields to public servants with fixed monthly incomes. But year after year, we see examples of how poorly this labour is valued. There is deep dissatisfaction across the public service yet the administration continues to impose annual wage increases without resort to collective bargaining. The argument about government not having the funds to pay more than a 5% increase barely holds up even in the absence of an actively engaged public service and a fractured labour movement. No amount of political spin could change this, so when public servants say they are surviving not living on the minimum wage, it is not a catchy slogan for the press but a candid insight into their ongoing struggle. These words – directed to Public Service Minister Jennifer Westford — came from the lips of a public servant on the picket line last year: “That woman has never known, or has forgotten what it is like to work for $60,000 a month. The money probably seem nuff, but when you done pay rent, light bill, phone bill, wife bill and children bill, oh and don’t forget you got to pay the tax bill, you still gotta buy food. We ain’t living in this country, we surviving, and even that we barely doing.”
But even in a society where the security of work offers no protection from poverty, and where the minimum wage is in fact a survival wage, there are those like the former Minister of Labour Manzoor Nadir, who are out of touch with the reality. At a PPP press conference, Nadir, a PPP/C MP, told reporters: “I go to the market every Sunday; I know what it takes for a family of four or five to put food on the table, to put shelter and so forth. The average public servant, what they make would be very sufficient to put the basic and enable them to acquire some of the material goods every family wants.”
Nadir by his statements clearly represents the economically comfortable in our society who are known for misrepresenting the reality of this country’s poorer classes – they rarely mention the chronic poor who are trapped in informal employment, they deny that the minimum wage is an unliveable wage, and now they are saying that public servants are earning enough.
Given a mere glimpse at the social panorama of our society, one could construct a language of poverty and inequality–a language that defines poverty not as a static group of people but a large section of the population that moves in and out of an economically vulnerable state throughout their entire lives.
There is hardly any mention of the widening social divide and how the economically vulnerable among us are in fact public servants. Put differently, the working poor are public servants, the majority of whom are women.
But Nadir already knows this. While serving as a minister he was privy to research work conducted by Red Thread which found that female-led, single parent households continue to grow in this country and as daily pressures of providing food and adequate shelter builds, these households are increasingly slipping into extreme poverty. Therefore, his statements about public servants earning enough are inexcusable. They are both offensive and misleading—the kind of absurdity that is often uttered in political circles when our leaders attempt to defend the indefensible.
This is the same government official who presided over one of the most shameful labour disputes in recent memory during his time in office. Nadir’s handling of the impasse between the Guyana Bauxite & General Workers Union and the RUSAL subsidiary, BCGI, exposed a lack of accountability to the workers of this nation, and an obvious disconnect between his ministerial duties and protecting workers’ rights.
During his term, he also missed a crucial opportunity to increase family incomes for thousands of low-wage workers and directly challenge the growth of inequality in our society. He also did nothing substantive to improve the quality of employment for Guyanese workers, especially for chronically poor people engaged in low wage employment so that their hard work can contribute to poverty escapes.
Further, this is the same government official under whose watch child labour became a major concern in our communities despite regular attempts to dismiss it as a minor problem being played up by international partners.
Our public servants are susceptible to poverty; the kind of poverty that comes with the dignity and security of work, and persists in the face of year-end 5% wage increases; and the kind of poverty that no amount of political rhetoric could distort. One wonders whether Nadir was going to the market every Sunday while he was a government minister. Not likely, because those market trips would have sensitised him to how the working class is struggling. He would have had to rub shoulders with the single-parent mothers and public servants who are often negotiating with vendors for reduced prices on everything from a bundle of bora to a pound of potatoes. He would have also found himself in the heart of open discussions about demoralising impact of water and electricity disconnections, and conversations about regular hassles with minibus conductors over whether fares have officially increased.
Our public servants are campaigning for liveable wages and human dignity, which is why we need to raise our voices in booming unison when the economically comfortable among us are bold enough to declare that the average public servant is earning enough.
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