Dear Editor,
Ever since February 26, SN’s Editorial had commented very assertively on the institutionalised contempt a foreign investor (Rusal) had shown to its Guyanese workers, and the substantive disrespect that employer had so far displayed for the country’s industrial relations laws, principles, procedures and practices.
With respect to the last it was noticeable that the only evocative protestors at the time were the Workers’ Union’s Lincoln Lewis, supported by the GTU’s General Secretary Coretta McDonald. At that particular point in time, there was an audible silence emitting from the country’s largest Union, the GAWU.
In all fairness they soon after became visible on a picketing line.
Curiously, however, when on Wednesday night, March 6, the two leading protesters were given opportunity to vocalise further on Christopher Ram’s Plain Talk, we learnt that the GAWU representative was absent, because of a competing engagement. What a contrast to Lincoln Lewis’ activist support at the time of the crisis in the sugar industry. However, the lack of this powerful voice giving support, orally or in writing (in SN) could not have been totally lost on more sensitive empathisers. And, while the current situation is by no means numerically on the scale, for example of the severance of thousands of sugar workers on the coastlands, it would appear not to have captured the focused interest of other stakeholders, probably because of the distance of the dislocation – up, up the Berbice River. Hopefully, the more recent Plain Talk would have created some higher degree of interest. For as emphasised, the issue is much larger than an industrial confrontation between foreign employer and local worker. It is very much that of a corporate interloper displaying the most profound disrespect, not only for our governance system, but for the international dignity and authority of this nation as a whole.
It is for the latter reason, therefore, one is forced to reflect on the virtual indifference shown amongst certain stakeholders: the individual political parties on either side of our cataclysmic divide; the private sector whose members’ track record displays only a conscientiousness of selective citizenship, as if we are not ‘all involved’ (to the chagrin of Martin Carter).
But yet, given all the argumentation on Plain Talk, and the subtle prodding of the host, the extant champions of this woefully under-mined cause, did not follow through with the logic of taking the matter of breaking relevant labour laws, to the courts.
For it was difficult to share any optimism for productive remedial action from the related agencies – Social Cohesion, Department of Labour, and the Ministry of Natural Resources, given their own record of inefficacy; and not to mention that of their complacent predecessors.
The flatulence of inaction has been too long buried in our individual and joint psyches.
The immediate next step to rehabilitation must be an energetic recourse to a legal address, on which basis the future of the bauxite industry can be better determined.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
