While it was a noble gesture for individuals and groups to organise themselves to offer hampers to some of the fired sugar workers in Berbice, it is a standing indictment of the callous treatment of this PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition meted out to those ex-workers. Everyone accepted the sugar industry was facing challenges, and as far back as 1998, the industry worked with the PPP government to craft a Strategic Plan for its viability.
Working within the constraints imposed by the IMF, which had to be brought in by Desmond Hoyte in 1989 because Guyana had been brought to its knees by the mountain of debt the PNC had racked up, the plan was basically to expand production in Berbice to bring down the overall high cost of production. The PPP argued that the IMF-proposed privatisation alternative, in an economic climate where there was no alternative employment for the then 20,000 sugar workers, was unacceptable.
Unfortunately, the centrepiece of the World Bank-sanctioned Skeldon Modernisation Plan for expanding Berbice production was hit by a non-performing factory that pushed costs up even further, even as the EU reneged on its Sugar Protocol that was supposed to last “in perpetuity, and slashed sugar prices in our largest market by 36%.
But through it all, the PPPC government persisted with diversifying and downsizing the industry, while balancing it with the need to keep workers off the bread lines.
As a country that evolved from a beginning in sugar, they understood — through our own bitter history — the fate of workers when the industry is left solely to “market forces”. In 1838, Britain abandoned its mercantilist trading policies for “free trade”, and threw the newly freed slaves into a subsistence agriculture when Britain refused their demands for a living wage and imported Indentured labour to undercut those demands. The structural inequities inherent in the socio-economic relations of that time acted to stunt the development of the descendants of the African slaves, and have formed the basis of their present claims against Britain and Europe for reparatory justice.
Against that background, it was therefore extraordinarily callous of the PNC-led coalition government to reject the proposal of their own Commission of Inquiry into the sugar industry to continue subsidising the latter for three years, until it can be brought to a point of sale that would offer the greatest benefit to the country and the workers. The Government, in an action reminiscent of the British Government of 1834, unilaterally threw 7700 workers (5700 from GuySuCo and 2000 from private farmers) into the streets, since Guyana does not even have “breadlines”.
There was a campaign promise by the Government that they would not “close” the industry, and they are attempting to convince the fired workers that, technically, they have not done so. But what they have done is worse; since, after the closures and firings, they have raised even more money than their CoI had suggested to keep the corporation afloat for three years.
Very unfeelingly, however, they have used the same argument that the closed estates must be brought to a viable point of sale. So what has been gained? Nothing, but bringing once proud workers — who came out of a tradition of resistance to oppression, and through whose sacrifice Guyana earned its freedom – to their knees, where they now have to depend on handouts. By hiring contractors to selectively hire some workers to keep the enterprise going with skeleton crews, the Government has now forced the starving workers to accept wages far below what they were used to after their trade union mobilisation efforts for decades. This is identical to what occurred after slavery, when the gangs of freed slaves had to choose between lowering their wage demands and retreating into subsidence agriculture.
Unfortunately, there are no abandoned estates for the fired workers to purchase for subsistence agriculture, since the Government’s SPU is reserving the closed estates for big business.
Maybe their descendants will demand reparations.
