The cane harvesters attached to Rose Hall estate who are currently on strike over a disagreement in relation to daily quotas had failed to meet “agreed standard requirements,” according to the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo).
In a statement issued on Friday, GuySuCo noted that a similar incident in 2013 led to a team comprising members of the corporation’s Industrial Relations Department and the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) General Secretary meeting with field representatives and field staff across the country before agreeing to a system of work share equal to work cut being addressed and reinstituted along with a system of payment that was entered into the 2014 GuySuCo/GAWU Collective Labour Agreement.
Stabroek News reported on Friday that all of the harvesting gangs, which account for a total of 979 workers, are refusing to work until the matter of daily quotas is settled and several of them staged a protest outside the factory’s compound, located at Rose Hall, East Canje, to press for the removal of the estate manager on Thursday.
The workers have claimed that they are usually paid based on how much work they complete each day yet they were informed by the manager that they will only be paid if they complete cutting all the beds stipulated for them each day.
“Normally, right, if them give we five bed and we cut three, that is what we getting paid for. Now them saying that we got to cut all out before we get pay, that is rubbish,” said one of the harvesters, who has been attached to GuySuCo since 1973.
However GuySuCo said that the long established requirement has been that “a cane harvester is expected to cut and load (manual) or cut and stack (semi-mechanical) no less than 2.6 or 5.0 metric tonnes of cane per day respectively.”
The sugar company in the statement refers to this quota as the task share and claims that it is a regular practice across the industry for “task share to be equal to task cut” before any extras agreed upon are paid in any one day.
The statement explains that if for any reason an obstacle impedes the harvester executing his task in a normal manner, he and the supervisory staff concerned would agree to a price based on the quantum of obstacles present. These obstacles also referred to by GuySuCo as extras “are payment earned outside of the regular task shared.”
As GuySuCo explains it the current strike at Rose Hall which commenced on Wednesday last, saw cane harvesters withdraw their labour after they were required to complete each of the tasks shared out in order to facilitate payment of the extras in addition to the normal task payment.
It further stated that should an employee load only two tonnes he will receive his payment for the canes cut but not the obstacle payment (extras) since the task shared of 2.6 tonnes was not completed.
The company foresees the action taken by the cane harvesters resulting in reduced productivity, underutilized factory capacity and non-achievement of weekly sugar production targets. Additionally the cane which the workers have not harvested will result in greater demands for extra payment the next day for stale and strip canes.
Rose Hall Estate is expected to grind at an output of 110 to 118 tonnes cane per hour over 130 to 140 hours per week in order to achieve its official target of 1,350 tonnes sugar per week. A target it was on course to meet before the action by the cane harvesters denied the entire estate from benefiting from a tax-free day’s pay.
