By yesterday morning and arising out of the latest in an unending series of management/worker confrontations between the majority-owned Russian bauxite behemoth and its Guyanese workers, there had reportedly arisen a standoff between residents of the Aroaima community and armed police, the issue that spawned this turn of events being the earlier blocking and unblocking of the Berbice River in the area of Kwakwani. Immediately prior to the writing of this editorial we had been told by a union source that that, indeed, was the situation on the ground.
On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, General Secretary of the Guyana Bauxite & General Workers’ Union (GB&GWU) Lincoln Lewis had spent a good part of the days locked in meetings with advisors or else, engaged with the Ministry of Social Protection, his objective, he said, being to have the 300-odd workers who had been sacked by the company restored to their jobs and to realize arbitration as a means of settling the issues that had spawned the controversy in the first place. As Lewis explained it the process he was seeking to have initiated was encountering pushback at two levels. At the first level there was the customary high-handedness and arrogance of RUSAL’s managers at Aroaima anchored to their position that they wanted no ‘third party’ involvement in the matter. The second was what Lewis sensed to be a position emanating from the Ministry of Social Protection that the pursuit of a settlement to the differences with the RUSAL managers at Aroaima should proceed without unduly ruffling the feathers of the majority shareholders in BCGI. Lewis makes it clear that arriving at any sort of modus vivendi with BCGI in the interest of industrial peace will probably always be difficult once you have to sit down with the Russians.
Up to earlier this week the GB&GWU was consulting with both its advisors in Georgetown and its dismissed members regarding, among other things, their reinstatement, the blocking of the Berbice River and the likelihood of compulsory arbitration. By Wednesday evening, Lewis had become visibly irritated over the fact that his own to-ing and fro-ing between his office inside the Critchlow Labour College Complex and the Ministry of Social Protection had accomplished little. Perhaps more disconcerting were the reports late in the day that policemen had turned up and unblocked the river and afterwards persons had simply restored the blockage. Worryingly, it was being reported yesterday morning that there was ensuing some kind of facedown between residents at Aroaima and armed police.
The wider problem is not an easily resolved one. The Russians at BCGI have a track record for arrogance, aloofness, contempt for the workers and, sadly, a seeming lack of regard for local institutions and high officials responsible for regulating their operations here. Their contempt for local authority, even ministerial authority has been a matter of public record.
BCGI employs hundreds of workers. That, frankly, is a ‘big deal’ for Guyana. The Russians have said, repeatedly, that their bauxite mining operations here are not hinged to RUSAL’s overall game plan. They have ‘rubbished’ the quality of our bauxite. The reality is, however, that their leverage reposes in the fact that they are, in local terms, a fairly significant employer of labour. That is the whip hand that they enjoy. It is the same advantage big companies in the extractive sector enjoy in mineral-rich countries in Africa. RUSAL, incidentally, is one such company. That is the rationale that informs its management style. Its management style is underpinned by a mix of open hostility to organized worker representation that seeks engagement with its managers on anything even remotely resembling an equal footing. Its preference is for a management culture driven solely by its own rules and regulations and which hold workers on a throttling rein.
The situation places crippling constraints on the ability of unions to function and places the ball in government’s court insofar as holding the RUSAL management at BCGI to account. All of the circumstances have created a challenging situation for which there are no easy answers. As it happens, however, the constant battle to persuade the Russian management at BCGI to respect the dignity of the workers, their right to be members of a union of their choice and to have them be mindful of the sovereignty of Guyana is not one that we can afford to surrender. As the current circumstances so clearly illustrate and even having regard to the weak hand with which we are playing, there is no escaping the reality that we have to draw a line in the sand on RUSAL. The price we are paying for our present posture is simply too high.
