The Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) on Monday said that local employees of a foreign-owned company providing services to the oil and gas sector have not been getting salary increases although expatriates are receiving.
GAWU did not name the company but Stabroek News has learnt that that it is G-Boats, a subsidiary of US-based Marine Company, Edison Chouest Offshore, located on Brickdam.
When this newspaper reached out to the company on Monday, its Human Resources Manager said he was not in a position speak. The manager stated that the Country Manager, who at the time was not in office, was the best person to speak with. The company promised to get back to the newspaper on the return of the Country Manager.
“Dismayingly, the GAWU Oil and Gas Branch was informed that the increases were only approved for that company’s expatriate staffers. The locals, on the other hand, who comprise a significant proportion of the workforce were excluded from that company’s consideration. The Guyanese employees informed our Union that they are at a loss for their exclusion,” the trade union said in a statement.
GAWU, which has been trying to represent workers in the industry, said this further illustrates the need for the sector to be organized.
In an earlier statement, the union had said that third party recruitment agencies have been contributing somewhat to exploitative workplace practices. From a review of documents shared with the union, GAWU has recognised that not many workers were employed by the enterprise for whom they were undertaking their tasks.
“Many workers are employed by agents who assign workers to work at one company or another. We have seen in some instances, workers from various agents working at different companies. Alarmingly, each agent apparently has their own benefits and conditions-of-employment, thus, workers who are undertaking the exact job in a particular company can have a completely different range of benefits. This, on the surface, appears discriminatory as workers undertaking the same job should lawfully receive equal benefits and reward,” the union said in a statement to the press earlier this year.
“A challenge is how do you bargain for someone who was hired by a third party? Traditionally, it has been employee and employer, but now there is the recruitment agency who supplies the workers to the company so we have to flesh out how we deal with that,” GAWU’s General Secretary Aslim Singh had explained. Singh also pointed out that employees are afraid in some cases to make their working conditions public as they are often victimised and intimidated by superiors.
