Dear Editor,
I have noted that among the honourees of the 2020 national awards is Mr. Lincoln Lewis, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. Mr. Lewis is also the General Secretary of the Guyana Bauxite and General Workers’ Union (GBGWU) and has so been for very many years.
Mr. Lewis has witnessed how this Administration has abused the working class of this country and the trade union movement as a whole. I know from personal conversations that Lewis continues to be offended by the failure and refusal of the Granger Administration to create a Ministry of Labour and appoint a Minister of Labour. No Government since 1953 has ever treated the Labour movement with such disrespect, relegating the responsibility for labour to a Department. He would also have witnessed the failure by the Administration to increase the minimum wage since 2016 and to honour its Manifesto commitment to free collective bargaining.
Lewis ought to be painfully aware that the Granger Administration threw more than seven thousand sugar workers on the breadline with no alternative employment for them or assistance to their families. In fact, sugar workers had to resort to the courts to receive statutory benefits. To add further insult to injury, the Government thorough its holding company has taken land on which workers have toiled for centuries and distributed it to foreigners for some half-baked and undefined projects which reek of crude electioneering.
More directly for Lewis, the Granger Administration has stood aside as RUSAL, the employer of workers represented by his GBGWU, refused to speak to his Union for ten years and continues to abuse its membership. RUSAL has fired over three hundred workers and has shown scant regard for the laws of this country.
In the light of all of this, the President of the TUC and Head of the Teachers’ Union, as well as the Head of the Telecommunications Union, have no problem in presenting themselves as candidates on the rebranded PNC-led APNU+AFC list campaigning for Granger’s re-election. In effect, they are campaigning for the continuation of lawlessness and further abuse of workers and their rights. Nothing speaks as eloquently of the state of labour and our politics as this betrayal of workers’ interest.
But Lewis with whom I have campaigned on a number of causes for more than three decades, should show that he can rise above his politics by distancing himself from an Administration that has so callously violated workers’ rights and their livelihood. He can best do so by refusing the award. Sadly, I doubt that Lewis will do so. He has allowed politics to get in the way of the overriding duty of defending and promoting loyalty and commitment to the cause of the workers of this country.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
