With a host of pressing issues — not least the plethora of audits of state institutions and Commissions of Inquiry into the crisis at the Georgetown Prisons and the emergency facing the Public Service – confronting the government, other considerations that might appear to be less urgent in nature can easily slip under the radar. That is in the nature of the manner in which the state is administered in Guyana. As seemingly bigger issues arise those that appear less urgent are invariably ‘dressed down,’ sometimes to a point where they are virtually forgotten; except, of course, that for one reason or another, official weighting of the scale of priorities becomes skewed to a point where some issues get a lesser importance rating than they deserve.
Last week a small group of relatively low-level employees of the Customs Administration who work in the Camp Street Complex contacted this newspaper to ask whether, as far as we were aware, any progress had been made regarding the official promise of several months ago to pursue an alternative place or places of work for the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) staff. This undertaking was given after it had been determined that sections of the Camp Street building were cracking and had become infested by some unknown fungus and that some employees working in the building had taken ill.
The previous administration, it will be recalled, had spent upwards of $400 million ‘renovating’ the building that had been acquired by the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) from the ill-fated CLICO. The building had been left lying idle for some time following construction. There has been no report – at least as far as this newspaper is aware – as to just what might be wrong with the property that might be linked to the health complaints of some GRA workers.
Of more immediate concern to the employees who spoke with this newspaper is the fact that several months after the promise of relocation was made they remain in the same place. Their entirely incontrovertible point is that in the absence of any sort of technical information as to the nature of the problem and its possible health-related consequences, they may well be exposed to continuing and further risk, the longer they remain there. One of the group even told this newspaper that the matter has become (and understandably so) a family concern though she says that as far she is aware her health is fine.
When the newspaper asked whether they had made their concern known to the authorities they conceded that they were timid about doing so. Their worry is that in the absence of a sufficient number of their colleagues who are prepared to stand with them in voicing their concern they fear that even the most polite of enquiries might run the risk of a response to the effect that they are making a ‘federal case’ out of nothing.
When this newspaper engaged the Chairman of the Guyana Revenue Authority Board on the matter some months ago he said that while a decision on relocation had been made, the size of the staff of the GRA posed a challenge, in terms of securing a single alternative complex. In the shortest of terms that position might have been acceptable. Over the longer term, however, that undertaking loses its currency since there is, as far we can tell, no reliable way of knowing whether continued exposure to the environment is making the employees’ health situation worse. After all, is it a known fact that, globally, health issues from housing workers in an unwholesome environment often arise long after they have left that work environment.
Here, issues of regular health checks for workers, monitoring of the premises and matters of liability in the event of illness, in either the short or long term arise. Unfortunately, these considerations have not, it seems, been part of either official consideration or public discourse.
Official attitude to workers’ safety and health at many state-run workplaces has been indifferent, to say the least. Beyond that, there has been evidence of a persistent official failure to effectively enforce the law in circumstances where private sector employers have been weighed and found wanting as far as safety and health are concerned. Slovenly official responses to workplace accidents that result in serious injury, even death, have become the order of the day and the routine official checks required under the law to ensure compliance with safety regulations are generally ignored.
The Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) has made at least one public pronouncement on the GRA relocation issue though it has to be said that the trade union movement, has itself been deficient in dealing with issues of safety and health at the workplace with the seriousness and consistency that the matter deserves. Public statements and strident pronouncements usually follow serious or fatal accidents. After that everything returns to a sort of as-you-were position.
The only undertaking that this newspaper could provide to the GRA workers with whom we spoke was that we would seek some hopefully effective way of bringing what, unquestionably, is a serious and legitimate concern to an employer, the Government of Guyana, that may well have allowed their concern to slip beneath the tide of other matters that would have arisen since and may well have been deemed to be equally urgent. Those workers, we trust, would be comforted to know that their employer is duly reminded and that the undertaking to relocate them to safer premises is, hopefully, not forgotten.
