No bank account, no pay – GuySuCo tells Uitvlugt workers, pensioners

Several workers and pensioners attached to the Uitvlugt Estate, West Coast Demerara, on Wednesday picketed their employer’s directives that they will not be paid unless they open bank accounts. This was revealed by the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) which said the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) must take steps to improve relations between workers and management. In the same vein, it called on the State-controlled entity to refrain from compulsion and threats.
GAWU noted that the past and present employees picketed the estate’s administrative office to call on GuySuCo to put an end to coerce them to have their wages and pensions be sent to the bank.
“The State-owned company is now telling the aggrieved that soon they will not be paid unless they submit their banking information to the estate. While we would want to believe the Corporation knows that withholding workers’ wages in an illegal act by itself, GuySuCo’s belligerently disrespectful attitude towards long-standing practices, laws, and even international conventions, in recent times, has us believing that the company is least bothered by the fact and the stain of notoriety,” the Union stressed on Wednesday.
Highlighting the continuing incidence of crime, GAWU said pensioners and workers have expressed fear of being robbed after they exit the bank. More than that, it was observed that vendors who ply their trade near pay offices would be disadvantaged as well.
The Union body posited that the Corporation’s moves are contrary to the Labour Act which requires at Section 19(1) that wages be paid in money. Section 19(4) of the Act also mandates employers to pay wages at convenient places near to the workplace; something that GAWU says is noteworthy.
Workers, according to GAWU, contend that they will now be forced to expend several hundred dollars weekly in order to travel to the banks at Vreed-en-Hoop and Parika to withdraw their wages. This would be similar to what occurs with most workers that are attached to large entities. GAWU however says its workers and pensioners “worry” that they may be forced to make more than one trip if the ATM is not working at the time they wish to withdraw their wages.
The Union also claims that one unnamed bank increased its withdrawal fees and added that other banks “may well follow suit”.
“[Workers] related that with pay rates frozen in the sugar industry since 2014; lesser work opportunities; and a reduction in incentive payments, among other things, they can hardly bear the costs GuySuCo is asking them to fetch. They said, as it stands right now, they are barely keeping their heads above water as they have been forced to significantly cut their cloth to suit their purse,” GAWU observed.
GAWU on Wednesday said it stands with the workers and the pensioners and calls on GuySuCo to do “what is right and decent and to pay the workers at their regular pay offices as they have been doing for a long time now. To compulsion and threatening attitude of the GuySuCo will not augur well to improve relations between the workers and the management which has been badly beaten over the last three years.”
Efforts to contact the management of the estate for a comment on the matter proved futile.