President David Granger has made a particular point of commending Ms Simona Broomes for her work in the Ministry of Social Protection even as he made the announcement regarding her move to the newly created Ministry of Natural Resources, amongst various other ministerial adjustments. In a sense, the singling out of Minister Broomes for a presidential accolade is a dead giveaway. Her reassignment was more than a matter of mere musical chairs.
Even so, there move has been met with an audible and disapproving public hum, (even in some instances among non-supporters of the political administration) not usually associated with ministerial reassignment in Guyana, where such matters are felt to be the sole prerogative of government. Some of the responses might even have suggested that the official explanation for the shifting of the woman who has secured the accolade as arguably the government’s most energetic minister, has been taken with a huge helping of salt.
All sorts of theories have been proffered regarding Minister Broomes’ reassignment, one of those being that differences between herself and Social Protection Minister Volda Lawrence had forced the decision to shift her to another ministry. There has been, for some while, less than muted differences between the two over what was believed to be Lawrence’s disapproval of Broomes’ handling of labour relations matters. Just days prior to the announcement of the minor ministerial re-shuffle Minister Lawrence had notified her junior colleague that she had been relieved of responsibility for Trafficking In Persons, (TIP), an area in which Broomes is regarded as having considerable expertise.
If much of the behind the scenes uneasiness arising out of the Broomes/Lawrence differences had failed to come to public attention that was because media coverage of the ministry focused primarily on Broomes’ success in wresting long-overdue employee entitlements from reluctant employers and raising the stakes as far as official insistence on workplace health and safety standards is concerned. Whatever else was going on inside the ministry attracted little public attention and it would not have been surprising if the senior minister was finding that trend discomfiting.
After she had sat down with several Chinese companies to discuss “the way forward” for labour relations, done high-profile walkabouts in the commercial areas in Georgetown and New Amsterdam and read a riot act to the Russian management of the Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) in the matter of the treatment of workers, Guyana Trades Union Congress General Secretary Lincoln Lewis dropped a broad hint in a newspaper article that Broomes should be elevated to the cabinet. Those kinds of overt lobbies are not commonplace in Guyanese politics.
Broomes, would, however, have had her detractors, not least, one feels, amongst those employers who would have been discomfited by her assertive official labour relations posture that insisted on the righting of historical wrongs and the correcting of irregularities. For them, Broomes would have been setting a worrying precedent. Indeed, it is perhaps not without significance that a hoped-for engagement between Broomes and private sector business support organizations last year, which, we are told, was intended to try to place government and the private sector on the same page as far as labour relations were concerned, never materialized. Her advocacy of a change from the woeful labour relations that had obtained for decades clearly had not gone down well in some quarters in the private sector. Accordingly, it is probably not surprising that moving Broomes from the Social Protection Ministry is being regarded in some quarters as a move that lets delinquent employers off the hook.
Those who argue that private sector pressure alone would not have derailed Broomes’ efforts to reverse the country’s poor labour relations record, are inclined to locate her reassignment in her seemingly implacable differences with Lawrence, a veteran of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR). Broomes is a newcomer to high profile party politics and watchers have suggested that it is at that level that the decision as to how to address the differences between herself and Lawrence was likely to have been made. If that is so, the fact that Broomes actually kept her job as a minister is probably a function of both party and government awareness that while separating herself and Lawrence had become politically necessary, removing her from the ministerial lineup altogether would have dented the image of the administration considerably.
Can the government’s push towards an improved labour relations regime and an enhanced official insistence on employers toeing the line in the matter of respect for workers’ rights be sustained in the wake of Broomes’ removal from the ministry? The answer goes beyond the mere articulation of policies, posturing and polemics. It is, as Broomes said some time ago in an interview with this newspaper, “about heart.” That is why what happens after she closes the door of her Brickdam office behind her for the last time can have a long-term effect on public perceptions of the Granger administration.
