Two months after a visit here by officials of the Russian company RUSAL in an effort to detoxify the relationship between the majority RUSAL-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) and the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers Union (GB&GWU) which has bargaining rights for some of the workers there, the protracted soured industrial relations climate persists.
However, GB&GWU General Secretary Lincoln Lewis has told Stabroek Business that a visit here late last year by officials of RUSAL,
“may have commenced a process towards a possible resolution of the outstanding issues.”
In an interview with this newspaper on Wednesday, Lewis disclosed that the visit here last December by RUSAL officials from Moscow had precipitated “direct dialogue with the company in Moscow” involving an unnamed legal adviser in Georgetown. He said that arising out of this dialogue the union had received “a proposal” from the management at Aroaima,” which he said had set out proposals for re-engagement with the GB&GWU. “I cannot recall any previous situation in which expatriate representatives of a company with business interests in Guyana had to be invited to the country to help with the settlement of an industrial relations dispute,” Lewis said.
Asked whether this meant that BCGI had now accepted the inevitability of re-engaging the GB&GWU, Lewis said that while the proposals from the company had alluded to an apparent readiness to commence negotiations for a new Collective Labour Agreement, they had raised as well “new issues relating to the terms of engagement which fall outside our customary industrial relations culture. In our response we have sought to have a relationship with BCGI that continues to be anchored within the framework of our industrial relations culture.”
Meanwhile, Lewis said that the current toxic relationship between BCGI and the GB&GWU has to be blamed “almost entirely” on the posture of the previous political administration as well as the present one. He asserted that “government had refused to lay down the law with BCGI, specifically with the Russian management, as far as their obligations in the matter of the treatment of workers is concerned.”
The visit here by the RUSAl officials from Moscow had come at the request of the Government of Guyana and Lewis, who had met with them during their stay here, had said that the visit had been “a belated intervention in a matter by government” that had come out of “the embarrassment they had felt after the Russian management at Aroaima had refused to attend a meeting in Georgetown with the Ministry of Social Protection.”
Of the previous political administration, Lewis said: “Rather than see the situation for what it was and deal with it frontally, the previous government simply allowed the Russians to carry on as though they owned the workers and the country. In effect, it was their attitude to the problem that caused the attitude of the Russians to become bolder and the situation to become worse. Apart from that they did their best to help sideline and frustrate the union.”
And asked for his assessment of the current situation in the light of the recent exchange of communication between the union and the company Lewis said that while it was “not ideal, …at least it represents what one might call a step in the right direction. Whether it represents real progress is hard to say since what has happened so far has been unable to make a difference to what is happening on the ground.”
And while the union’s long-standing General Secretary said he had planned to visit the BCGI operations he conceded that the logistics were yet to be worked out given the fact that union officials were not currently welcome at the work site. “We have informed the officials in Russia of our intention to visit the plant and they had responded through their attorney here saying that they don’t have a problem with it. I’m afraid, however, that what is happening on the ground at BCGI appears not to be consistent to the more conciliatory tone coming from RUSAL in Russia,” Lewis said.
He has since been informed that RUSAL was also “talking with government officials” though he was not aware of either the agenda or the status of the talks. “It seems to me that what government ought to be doing at this time, both as the protectors of the Constitution and as a shareholder in RUSAL is making tough demands of the Russian management at BCGI with regard to changing the industrial relations climate to have it become consistent with the laws of the country. Pressure from the government in that regard can definitely be a game-changer,” Lewis said.
