Yesterday, the world — and Guyana — celebrated Human Rights Day 2017. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and two years later sponsored Dec 10 for the annual commemoration of the day by all member states. It is perhaps ironic that two international covenants on human rights — the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — were adopted by the UN in 1966, the same year that Guyana gained independence and became a member of the UN.
As the latter states, “The two Covenants, together with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights form the International Bill of Human Rights, setting out the civil, political, cultural, economic, and social rights that are the birthright of all human beings.”
But for four thousand sugar workers who were fired in the last two years, during the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Covenants, the high sounding rhetoric rings very hollow.
In the years leading up to our independence, there was a great debate, both internationally and locally, about the utility of the political rights that would be granted on such occasions. The founders of both the PPP and the PNC scoffed that such rights were illusory “bourgeois” rights that simply allowed the working people to cast their ballots every five years. Of what use would be such political rights when citizens were starving to death? Both political and economic rights had to be instituted and enjoyed by the people.
For a country that had been colonised and its citizens’ labour exploited for hundreds of years, it was an article of faith that “economic” rights were fundamental to the “good life” that independence was supposed to usher in. Those who defined themselves as “Marxists”, or even ‘socialists” as Forbes Burnham, leader of the PNC was, were committed to this latter viewpoint. While one may disagree with his specific “cooperative” economic model for advancing those economic rights, his premise was on point.
It is more than ironic, therefore, that the Chairman of GUYSUCO, Clive Thomas, who was one of our most doctrinaire Marxists in our post-independence era, is now enthusiastically throwing sugar workers onto the breadlines. When the bauxite industry started to experience troubles in the 1970s, Thomas was in the forefront of organising bauxite workers to secure their economic rights. Today, when sugar workers are being fired like buckshot, Thomas is actually the man doing the firing.
The further irony is that the market fundamentalism against which Marxists like Thomas railed in the past but practise today has very few defenders today, even in the bastions of the capitalist nations such as the US. The trenchant criticism against allowing only the market to make decisions is that, ultimately, the making of moral decisions are passed to the market place. Even Adam Smith did not envisage this anomaly: we cannot read his “Wealth of Nations” without his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”.
What deguts Clive Thomas’s advocacy for the closure of the sugar estates without making provisions for alternative employment for the workers is that GUYSUCO is not a “private company”, but is one “owned by the people of Guyana”, of which sugar workers are still members. No one is denying that the sugar industry was facing a cash-flow crisis; but the first job of a Government is to act in the best interest of citizens – here, the workers. Even the US intervened when its auto industry faced a cash crunch, by injecting funds into it until it could survive on its own. This was the precise recommendation of the CoI into sugar, of which Clive Thomas was a member, but which was ignored.
The fundamental human right of a citizen is a right to life, and when the Government is the employer, the worker cannot be thrown into circumstances in which he faces certain destitution and almost certain death.
Sugar workers are also humans with rights.
