Still the plantation

Even with the announcement that a privately funded sugar refinery is imminent, the fundamental challenge to the viability of the industry – high production costs – stubbornly persists. While several reasons have been proffered, ranging from rainfall to outdated factories, as one who grew up and still lives on one of these plantations, I remain surprised that one of the hurdles is rarely, if ever, raised: the social relations between workers and management.
The plantation has been described by some as a “total institution” that acted to socialise, through force and other coercive methods, the workers into an organised “machine” for production. Unquestionably, the planters had a clear picture of what the ideal plantation worker ought to be: docile, industrious, concerned about the plantation’s interests ahead of their own and willing to follow orders. That the workers would have resisted this dehumanisation was also not unexpected, and plantations’ social and industrial relations were structured to overcome this resistance.
Founded on slave labour, productivity was predicated on violence, backed by the always-available state coercive institutions. The demands of the sugar plantations required comparatively large investments, which in turn demanded consistent and cheap production to deliver a high return. Violence and coercion were integral features of the plantation economy to discipline individuals into this new technology of production. The abolition of slavery, while a landmark change in the legal relations between planters and workers as owner and chattel, only forced changes in the methodology of applying the violence to extract production during the indentureship period and after.
Workers were organised into “gangs” under the direct supervision of “drivers” who were selected for the position by white overseers, recruited from the rural Scottish and Irish underclass. They lived in exclusive “senior staff” gated, immaculately mowed compounds with servants who took care of their every whim. The drivers – locals most willing and capable of obtaining the greatest amount of labour for the least amount of money from their fellow workers – lived apart from the workers housed in logies. Both senior and junior staff had their exclusive “clubs”, while the workers retreated to their rum shops.
The post-WWII reforms did little to alter social relations: while the workers were facilitated into “extra-nuclear” housing schemes, the senior staff facilities were upped to include swimming pools and refurbished tennis courts. Guyanisation, which started in the 1950s, saw some locals becoming overseers but were now called “superintendents”. A semantic genuflection to the social contradictions was the dubbing of plantations as “estates”, completely oblivious to the latter’s connection to the “estates” of the English gentry, complete with the “Great Houses” on which the manager’s house had been modelled since the 18th century.
Nationalisation of the industry by the “co-operative socialist” PNC in 1976 accelerated the Guyanisation process at all levels of management with the new criterion of possessing a “party card”. Even though all were to be addressed as “comrades”, this did not mean increased camaraderie or any change in the social distance between managers, superintendents and workers. The life of the cane-cutter remained closest to the Hobbesian state of nature – “nasty, solitary, brutish and short”. He still enters the fields at 17 and leaves 20 years later, a broken man at the age of 37 who looks like he is 60. He still has to work six and sometimes seven days a week during the crop season and then at best live on the pittance he is given for the four days of “task work” offered during the “out of crop” season. He still can only drown his degradation in the rum shops and take out his frustrations on his family.
Corruption entered the sugar equation after nationalisation and has remained endemic since the local managers could now connive and collude to accumulate local wealth.  When the white man was exploiting the workers socially and economically through their local drivers, the latter’s excesses might have been excused as “just doing their jobs”, but in the present dispensation, the “superintendents” and managers who literally lord it over the workers are greatly resented. Interestingly, while the white overseers used to be in the fields daily to ensure the various tasks were performed to standard, this is the exception with the locals.
While the other proposed innovations, such as increased mechanisation, are necessary to turn around the sugar industry, they are not sufficient. There must be more equitable social relations engendered. This would be deepened if sugar workers were to be transformed into sugar farmers.