A few weeks ago Natural Resources and Environment Minister Robert Persaud provided responses to questions put to him by this newspaper about conditions in the mining sector covering both the gold and bauxite industries and embracing such issues as the general state of health of the respective industries, safety and health, the environment and – in the particular case of the bauxite industry, industrial relations. In most of the areas mentioned, the Minister provided fairly comprehensive responses though in the particular case of management/worker relations at the Bauxite Company Guyana Inc (BCGI) his responses appeared to rely in large measure on versions of events provided by the company, which, in some instances, we found to be at variance with information gleaned from other sources.
The Russian-owned Rusal Bauxite Company, the majority shareholder in BCGI, has a less than stellar record in the areas of both safety and health and industrial relations. One remembers only too well the explosion at Kwakwani in March 2013 whilst the company was disposing of outdated explosives and the subsequent ‘roasting’ that the company received from Commissioner of the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) Rickford Vieira over what he said was the company’s transgression of some pretty basic procedures associated with the safe disposal of explosives.
In the matter of industrial relations the general drift of Minister Persaud’s response suggests that he has been persuaded that there has been a change from what one might call the ‘bad old days’ when the company’s Russian management and the local workers were perpetually at ‘daggers drawn’ and when there was no love lost between the Rusal officials and the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers’ Union (GB&GWU) which is still ‘on the books’ so to speak as the workers’ representative but which, as far as we have been told, has no relationship with the company whatsoever.
When we put Minister Persaud’s understanding of worker/management relations to sources at Kwakwani and to Guyana Trades Union Congress General Secretary Lincoln Lewis, we were told that the truth was that, over time, the BCGI management had succeeded – by distancing the workers from, the union and instituting its own unorthodox methods of managing worker/management relations – in creating a regime of compliance that amounted to tyranny. Mr Lewis went further, charging that the Ministry of Labour had been profoundly indifferent to the transgressions of the country’s labour laws. Mr Lewis even openly stated that he believed the situation was as the government wanted it.
In the wake of last Friday’s accident this newspaper spoke with both Chief Labour and Occupational Safety and Health Officer Charles Ogle and Safety and Health practitioner Dale Beresford. The former undertook to see the enquiry into the accident through expeditiously, while the latter took the position that the enquiry and its findings were, in themselves, of little merit, if the Ministry of Labour was unable to impose penalties in cases where accidents were found to be the result of safety and health transgressions and, more importantly, enforce those penalties.
All of this, as Mr Beresford sees it, requires an overhaul of the prevailing national safety and health regime as it pertains to finding the expertise to pursue accident enquiries and produce reliable findings, as well as to ensure that companies that might be in breach are made to pay some sort of penalty. None of this can happen without the active support of government at the policy level and it does the image of the responsible Ministry no good when workers claim as a general rule that bad company practices injure worker/management relations and might even, in some instances, compromise the safety of workers.
Based again on what we were told by Minister Persaud it certainly appears as though hopes for a meaningful increase in bauxite production in the short to term rest with BCGI’s Kurubuku mines. That may well be so though it is worth bearing in mind that the responsibility of government in this matter extends to the welfare of the workers and if – as may well be the case – it becomes necessary to make that point to the Rusal managers, then government must abandon what would appear to be the prevailing ‘softly, softly’ approach and tell them like it is.
