Some city council workers were yesterday finally paid wages owed to them since last month after a second day of protest action.
A source from City Hall last evening related that some workers were issued payment yesterday, either by cheque or by direct deposit into their bank accounts. The source said the others will not be paid until Friday.
A number of city council workers had staged a protest outside the Ministry of Communities on Monday, accompanied by President of the Guyana Labour Union Irma Glenn and President of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Guyana (FITUG) Carvil Duncan, over the frequent delayed payment of their wages and salaries.
The protest action came after Town Clerk Royston King repeatedly failed to deliver on promised payments on several occasions.
Duncan had promised that if salaries were not delivered by the end of Monday, the next step would be for the workers to strike from the day cares and markets.
Nevertheless, day two of the protest saw workers from various departments, inclusive of sluice operators and market cleaners, picketing on the Regent Street pavement outside City Hall. Glenn described it as a sit in, while noting that some workers took up their posts yesterday, but they were all in support of one another.
Around 11 am, Councillor Andrea Marks approached the protesters to relay a message sent by King that they would be paid by 2 pm yesterday.
The news seemed to encourage rather than calm the protest as the picketing action by workers picked up steam after the announcement was made. The protestors were soon after joined by Deputy Mayor Sherod Duncan, who bore a placard displaying the words “Royston King Must Go.”
‘Financial inadequacy’
In a press release sent late yesterday afternoon by his office, King maintained his position that the delay in payments was due to “financial inadequacy” resulting from monies owed to the city and a “narrow revenue base.” He even went so far as to list outstanding amounts owed to the city by various entities.
It was stated that the council is owed in excess of $18 billion in taxes by corporations and property owners. Of that sum, hundreds of millions of dollars are said to be owed by the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), including $182 million for property in Kingston, $55 million by Queensway, in excess of $164 million by the Georgetown Fishermen Cooperative Society as well as sums from corporations such as the Guyana Power and Light Inc and the Guyana Water Inc.
It was also noted that while there has been an increase in the cost of delivering goods and services to communities, owing in part to the introduction of Value Added Tax, this was not supplemented by an increase in property taxes.
The statement went on to thank workers for their patience, understanding and support of the city’s efforts to “restore Georgetown to its pristine state.”
Something is wrong
Duncan, in response to claims made by King that the salary delays are due in part to a sacrifice being made by the council to provide services to communities, stated that “it cannot be either/or.”
“When people work they have to be paid,” Duncan stated, while questioning the validity of King’s claim that the council’s inability to pay employees is due in part to outstanding payments from individuals and persons in the private sector.
“The Minister of Communities for the tripartite meeting said recently, or I’ve seen this in text form, that he has had cause to ask the city council for a financial statement and he said from what he has seen, the city is not in a financial crisis. So why our workers can’t be paid? I don’t believe that we have to hold back city services as against paying workers,” Duncan commented.
The Deputy Mayor also said that city council workers “carry the burden of the clean city” and “everything that we want as a city” and, therefore, need to be treated better. He ended with a call for the Minister of Communities Ronald Bulkan and President David Granger to stage an intervention. “We cannot run a municipality—every month we owe our workers, every month we owe our contractors, every month we owe our service providers. We cannot operate like that. In the national capital city? Something is wrong with that, and I’m in solidarity with our workers,” he added.
