It is now a cliche – and a tired one at that – to point out “those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them”. Today is “Enmore Martyrs’ Day” and while there will be a plethora of speeches invoking the five unfortunate cane cutters who were killed by the colonial Police back on June 16, 1948, what does the incident mean to us today in Guyana?
At the barest minimum, with our country having just completed a mammoth celebration of the 50th anniversary of our independence from Britain, we should be asking whether independence delivered to the sugar workers the promises that were made at the gravesides of the martyrs 68 years ago. And if not, why? Guyanese do not even need the recently submitted report of the Commission of Inquiry to appreciate the state of the industry. The travails of a corporation that once produced 350,000 tonnes of sugar while employing 28,000 persons are now well known, since the country has been regaled for the past decade with its struggle to just surpass 250,000 tonnes.
From one perspective, some might claim “independence” failed the sugar workers, even though successive Governments claimed they worked to improve the lot of the sugar workers. While the 1948 strike that led to the death of the workers at Enmore was for better wages and working conditions, it was more importantly, a strike for recognition of a trade union to bargain of behalf of the workers. The Man Power Citizens’ Association (MPCA) that was formed a decade earlier at the time of another mass killing of sugar workers (at Leonora), had lost the confidence of the workers and the new Guiana Industrial Workers Union (GIWU) was seeking recognition by the sugar producers.
But that union – transformed into Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union (GAWU) – did not succeed until 1976 when the People’s National Congress Government nationalised the industry. But the latter, ostentatiously placing signs in front of every estate “owned and operated by the people of Guyana”, yet quashed the profit sharing scheme for sugar workers introduced by the departed British BOOKERS, by introducing a levy on sugar that wiped out all profits. This was interpreted by sugar workers and “punishment” for not supporting the Government at the polls. However when GAWU’s ally, the PPP acceded to office in 1992, the levy was not extinguished until a decade later.
The lesson for today’s sugar (and other) workers is they must insist their unions place their interest ahead of any other concerns especially that of political parties to which they may have fraternal relations. History has shown that parties in power have to look at issues from a “national” perspective, which on occasion may clash with that of sugar or other particularistic interests.
Another lesson would be to factor in the global economic structures in which sugar is embedded and which might dictate a logic that is at variance with local plans. In 1948 for instance, our sugar was being sold to Britain by Bookers. The next year negotiations were opened on a Commonwealth Sugar Agreement that was consummated in 1951 and was in place at independence 1966. This continued until 1973 when Britain acceded to the EU and was transformed into the Lome Convention in 1975. The new agreement to last “in perpetuity” was crafted in the midst of a spike in the price of sugar.
In all of this, Guyana did not have very much “independence” in the marketing arrangements, which to be fair at the time was quite lucrative for the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) – but for reasons that concerned European farmers rather than Guyana’s. When conditions in Europe changed in Europe in the new millennium, Europe unilaterally broke the protocol in 2009 as sugar prices were slashed by 36 per cent. The Government has had to struggle to keep sugar’s head above water.
What made matters worse is the levy was siphoned off by the governments for “economic diversification” rather than in profit sharing or capital reinvestment and sugar workers have to pay the price.
