Employees of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) may just have returned to work with a meagre 8 per cent salary increase following a period of industrial action, but according to information reaching this newspaper sustained high gold prices over several years had seen the entity raking in healthy sums of money.
Between 2008 and 2009i the GGMC’s earnings from the sector increased from $3.6 billion to $4.3 billion, while its takings from gold in 2010 jumped to $4.9 million. A further significant increase in the GGMC’s takings from gold occurred in 2011, when earnings jumped to $5.2 billion. The following year, 2012, gold earnings for the commission almost doubled, jumping to $9.3 billion.
Sources close to the GGMC have told this newspaper that officers who have worked with the GGMC “for years” still earn as little as $80,000 per month and many have seen their living conditions decline in relation to those of “the real beneficiaries” from official takings from the sector. The source told Stabroek Business that against the backdrop of meagre wages and “insulting salary increases” senior staff of the GGMC continue to be engaged in taxing research associated with presentations at mining fora, writing and re-writing sanitation regulations for mining areas. Others, this newspaper was told, enjoy hugely advantageous “negotiated packages.”
The GGMC source said the manner in which the dispute over wages and salaries would appear to have been concluded is “certain to give rise to more talk inside the commission as to where the returns from gold are going and who might be benefiting more than whom. Those are issues that are never far away from the gossip agenda in the GGMC.”
Meanwhile, concerns are widespread that inadequate wages and salaries could give rise to an intensification of what is believed to be the prevalence of ‘shakedowns,’ bribery and other corrupt practices in the sector involving some miners and officers who are charged with enforcing mining regulations. “It may not be discussed much in public but it is known that these corrupt practices are widespread and that partly, not entirely, but partly because of poor pay, are hard to stop,” the source said.
