The Guyana Sugar Cor-poration (GuySuCo) will be playing catch up with production targets as workers trickle back to the Skeldon Estate following almost a week of striking.
As of yesterday, Skel-don managed to produce just over 190 tonnes of sugar for the week and will most likely miss its reported target of just under 1,800 tonnes.
GuySuCo’s Human Resources Director Jairam Petam told Stabroek News that the strikes will have cost the company over 1,500 tonnes of sugar. He noted that the one day strikes conducted by Albion and Rose Hall workers in solidarity with Skeldon meant that 500 tonnes of sugar was not produced by high production estates.
Petam said that the strike created additional pressure on good opportunity days and in essence wasted good days. Petam said that after Skeldon workers met with management on Sunday, following an altercation on Friday which saw dock worker Stephen Daniels dismissed, they were determined to strike. “Nothing would have prevented them from industrial action,” Petam noted.
Stabroek News was told that GuySuCo wished to resolve the issue sooner rather than later because of the cost to production. The newspaper was told that the second crop harvest was to end in November and while the strike was only responsible for a week of disruption Skeldon is already looking to continue the second crop into December.
Without the strike, the weekly target of 1800 tonnes would have been made comfortably, this newspaper was told. Last week, Skeldon produced 1,678 tonnes of sugar, surpassing a target of 1,650. The week prior the estate surpassed its target by over 280 tonnes, making 1,920 tonnes.
According to a Skeldon employee, the factory was taking advantage of the good opportunity days but the strike has repercussions that will likely go into next week.
He told Stabroek News that the factory was only able on Tuesday to grind 445 punts of cane which were harvested since last Friday. He said that the tonnes of cane to tonnes of sugar ratio was extremely high as a result of deterioration.
“If we had ground that cane fresh, we probably would have gotten 101 tonnes. We lost about 30 tonnes of sugar,” he explained.
He said that it wasn’t just the canes in the punts that had significant deterioration but the burnt cane, amounting to approximately 290 punts, would have produced about 1,800 tonnes of cane and 137 tonnes of sugar.
“There was the arson cane and there was the burnt canes aside from the arson cane, so you are losing sugar… it is a pity,” the high ranking official said. He added that the losses caused by the strike will have ramifications for the industry because the five days were all good opportunity days.
“This has thrown us back one full week,” Stabroek News was told.
Meanwhile, GuySuCo and the Guyana Agricul-tural and General Workers Union (GAWU) will meet again today with a conciliator to discuss the way forward following the terms of resumption that were agreed upon on Wednesday to bring the strike to an end.
On Friday of last week, Daniels got into a physical altercation with the estate manager Dave Kumar and was subsequently issued with a dismissal letter on Saturday. On Wednesday, after days of negotiations, the union and GuySuCo agreed that Daniels’ dismissal would be amended to a suspension without pay pending a further investigation, while workers would return to the job.
The union has argued that Kumar was intoxicated at the time of the incident but the state-owned corporation has since refuted the claim.
