Dignity for sugar labour

Commenting on the sugar industry and its challenges some months ago, ex-President Donald Ramotar wrote about the underutilised vast reservoir of knowledge immanent in ordinary sugar workers. He suggested, “One of the ways in which this could be done was by giving workers a greater stake in the industry. To create worker cooperatives in which workers would not only look forward to wages but to dividends at the end of the crop.”
This means assisting workers with technical skills to run a worker cooperative. To give the lands to these workers in groups to produce canes for the publicly owned factories. This would help in improving workers’ conditions; rather than just depending on wages, workers become shareholders. This is one way of allowing workers to be owners as well.”
The co-op proposal is interesting for several reasons; one being it attempts to address another of the major challenges to securing optimum quantities of cane for the factories: retention of field workers. As the Guyanese economy has improved since 1992, labour drifted away as they had done earlier in the other Caricom countries, especially Barbados and St Kitts, where Guyanese seasonal labourers had taken up the slack since the 1980s. While the comparatively low rate of pay was certainly a factor in the exodus from our cane fields, the social and psychological realities of the sugar industry also played an under-appreciated role.
It is not for nothing that when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was launched in 1919, it emphasised the necessity of employers providing “dignified working conditions” for the workers. “Dignity” is an inalienable right of humans, but, unfortunately, it was denied to those who laboured. In the early days, only the “nobles” possessed “dignity” and, of course, labour was infra dig for them.
The sugar industry in the West Indies was founded on slave labour, which, more than any other institution in the history of mankind, stripped away the dignity of the labourers in the field. It – and its successor labour regime – indentureship, left a lasting legacy in the minds of our people that field labour in general, and field labour in the sugar industry in particular, is to be avoided.
The decree that abolished slavery in the French empire on the basis of its incompatibility with human dignity was an important breakthrough, as this seems to be the first mention of dignity in its modern sense in a major legal text. It was noteworthy that the British declaration had no such aspiration and the “education” system they imposed emphasised that “dignity” was only found in the professions and the offices. Never in the fields.
This attitude has persisted in the Caribbean and in Guyana, and explains the unwillingness of the children of the cane-cutters to follow their fathers into the cane fields, once alternatives are available. The co-op is a mechanism that attempts to straddle the “alienation of labour” from their products, which Marx criticised as inherent in the capitalist mode of production – not just its early slave-variant. The workers would share in the production of the co-op and also in its profits.
Fortunately, in Guyana, co-ops as a vehicle for cultivating sugar cane is not a theory. In 1956, as part of his visionary reform efforts, the socialistic-minded Jock Campbell, Chairman of Bookers, launched the Belle Vue Co-op society with 57 sugar workers. They were each given control of 15 acres of land, house lots, loans for a completed house, garden plot, etc. This initiative was specifically launched to address the “alienation” issue. Later, to comply with other initiatives by the industry, they were joined by other private sugar cane producers on the West Bank of Demerara, including the Canal Polders.
By and large, the model was successful and we commend to the Government the cooperative proposal. We need to think outside the box to create a viable sugar industry.