General Secretary of the Guyana Trades Union Congress, Lincoln Lewis has told the Stabroek Business that the time is long overdue for the country’s leading Business Support Organisations (BSOs) to “publicly and vociferously identify with environmental and health and safety issues in the workplace as an integral part of their public pronouncements on important national issues.”
“It may or may not have occurred to a great many people that the major umbrella business organisations rarely if ever make public pronouncements that express concern over specific workplace environmental and safety and health issues whenever these become matters of public concern. Oddly enough, their silence persists in an environment where a great many of the most blatant workplace safety and health transgressions and other environmental shortcomings that occur in the country are to be found in private sector workplaces,” Lewis disclosed.
The veteran trade unionist told the Stabroek Business that while labour continued to receive complaints about health-threatening instances of safety and transgressions “in factories and workplaces,” nothing is heard from the private sector bodies even though sometimes I get the impression that affected workers suffer in silence because of a fear – real or imagined, of employer victimisation.”
According to Lewis, Business Support Organisations such as the Private Sector Commission (PSC), the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), the Consultative Association of Guyanese Industry (CAGI) and the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA), ought to be in the forefront of the lobby to push their members towards continually improving their safety and health standards. He said that while it was the responsibility of the Labour Department to handle instances of alleged safety and health infractions, he believed that the BSOs can “bring their own particular type of pressure to bear on their members” to improve their safety & health standards. “They cannot depend on the trade unions and the Labour Department alone,” Lewis emphasised. “If you look at the leadership of the BSOs you will find that numbered among the leaders are some of the most high-profile and influential business leaders in the country. I cannot assume that their authority to make pronouncements on national issues stops when it comes to issues that affect their workers.”
Asserting that this is not the first occasion on which the issue had been raised with the trade union movement, Lewis said that it had been previously suggested to him that the reason for BSOs avoiding public comment on workplace safety issues and environmental transgressions was linked to the fact that some of the key members of those organisations are themselves owners and managers of privately run businesses that may well be falling short of meeting the desired safety and health and environmental standards. In response, he noted, “While I do not necessarily accept that this is true, I have to admit that there have been instances in which prominent local businesses have come under public scrutiny on account of workplace safety and health issues and the response of the BSOs has been silence.”
Lewis pointed out that safety and health standards in workplaces in both the public and private sectors may well have reached “more acceptable levels” if the private sector bodies were more assertive on the issue. “We in the trade union movement have consistently called out the Labour Department for what, frequently, has been its sloth, even indifference in dealing with workplace safety and health issues. Perhaps you can say that we have not been as efficient in calling out the private sector organisations on these same issues. Yes, perhaps that has been the case.”
Lewis, meanwhile, lamented that he was “personally disappointed” that none of the country’s major Business Support Organisations “uttered a single word” whilst the Guyana Bauxite & General Workers Union (GB&GWU) of which he is General Secretary, “was struggling to try to have the various safety wrongs righted” at the majority Russian-owned Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI). “In my opinion, with overseas investor[s] likely to grow, now that oil is definitely a big economic deal in Guyana, BSO signals to BCGI that they needed to get their safety and health act together would have served as an important signal to foreign investors seeking to do business here,” in the period ahead.
According to the General Secretary, while local business enterprises have every right to follow up lucrative entrepreneurial pursuits in partnership with overseas investors in oil and gas and other sectors, “we must hope that those partnerships result as well in a collective undertaking on the parts of both the local and foreign partners to be respectful of the country’s environmental and safety and health laws and mindful of workers’ welfare. I expect that that is one of the issues which the trade union movement will have to keep an eye on in the period ahead.”
He declared that the advent of oil and gas-related investments and economic activity will bring local private sector bodies under even greater scrutiny insofar as their advocacy of safety and health standards are concerned. “One of the things that we must aim for is a set of conditions in which local/overseas business partnerships that have to do oil and gas-related activities do not create the kinds of compromises that extend to a point where local businesses and business organisations are pushed into positions where they remain silent on workplace indiscretions in order to preserve their foreign business partnerships,” Lewis said.
