As we have been reporting this year – March 12th – marks the 100th Anniversary of the cessation of indentured labour from India. During the 79 years of indentureship starting in 1838, the immigrants had been dubbed “bound coolies”. This perfectly described the way the sugar planters viewed them: as a group that would perform menial labour without any mobility away from the ambit of the plantation. And it’s more than an irony of history that at Wales, we have a recapitulation of the indenture experience going on.
The essence of indentured labour was the contract that was signed by the “indentured servant” that was supposed to define the terms of his employment – hours of work, wages, hospitalisation, return passage to India etc. But more often than not, it was honoured in the breach leading to daily disputes between the labourers and the “overseers” and “drivers”. The unequally negotiated contract became a tool the planters used to ensure if the indentureds were not in the fields working, then the only excuse accepted was they were in hospital or in jail.
Indentured labour is usually described as a transition device from slave labour to “free” labour, which state theoretically arrived after the last indentured labourers served out their contract by 1921. But it was a long and arduous – but ultimately futile – struggle waged by sugar workers for the premises of indentureship to be lifted from those that ran the industry. During the transition from slavery to indentureship, the remnants of the anti-slavery movement could be counted on to agitate in England when information on planter excess reached them. After indentureship, this task fell on the trade unions that were formed after 1939, when another protest by the workers ended in the police reading the riot act shooting and killing four and wounding dozens.
At Wales, fifty years after independence from Britain, which was celebrated in grand style by the APNU/AFC government, the latter condescended to inform neither to the sugar workers nor their unions when they decided to shutter the plantation. How different was this from the days of indentureship when labour was a commodity, and who informs commodities of their fate?
While the indentureship contract specified the hours of work to be seven and a half hours, “from dawn to dusk” was the reality. Today, even though the contract of the “free labour” specifies that if the employee is sent to work more than ten miles from his regular worksite, the employer is constructively breaking the contract, the government-run Guysuco insists that six-hundred cane-cutters must go daily to Uitvlugt, twenty-two miles away and not concede their demand for severance pay, which is due them for being effectively fired. The canecutters are seen as “bound coolies” with no control over their mobility.
The truth is, Guysuco always knew the canecutters would refuse the “option” of working at Uitvlugt and their “offer” was made simply to allow the corporation to escape from its responsibility to pay the workers for constructively “severing” them. Uitvlugt suffered even more from the dynamics that operated at Wales and huge swaths of its lands had been abandoned while the factory is in no better shape that Wales, if that.
Yet Guysuco is blithely claiming Uitvlugt could triple its production to 40,000 tons with the canecutters from Wales. Even if the cane were to be found to be cut, where would they be processed? The centrifuge, for instance, at Uitvlugt has been defected since the beginning of the decade, resulting in the yields being about half of Albion’s. Yet without even mentioning whether it will be fixed, production is projected to rise.
Last week, we referred to Professor Frankfurt’s use of the word “bullshit” which is worse that a lie, since in the latter one knows the truth but is simply hiding it. At Wales, the government is simply bullshitting since they have absolutely no concern for the truth- they just want to sound “plausible” to escape culpability. There is no concern that they are dealing with the livelihood and lives of over six thousand persons. Even during indentureship, the planters were never this callous.
