The following was a statement was presented by Gordon Thomas at a press conference held at the GAWU head office today (October 10, 2017).
Ladies and gentlemen of the media, we wish to express our appreciation to you for your presence here this morning. We hope that through you, our plight would be shared with the people of Guyana and those beyond our shores. We also hope that our message will be heard loudly and clearly by those in charge of our country.
We come to you here on behalf of the thousands of ordinary, hard-working Guyanese who have been affected by the demise of Wales Estate nearly a year ago. For many of us, working at Wales is the only thing we have ever known. We have grown up knowing that the estate as the major employer in our communities. For a lot of us, we have followed our parents and grandparents in working in the fields and factory of Wales, and for some of us our children and grandchildren have also followed us in working at the estate. We had high expectations that, like the many that came before us, we would have worked until pensionable age, giving our best years and efforts to the estate, the sugar industry, and our country.
Today, the sad reality is that the Government and the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) have forcibly taken our livelihoods from us. In that process they have sought to take away our dignity and our pride. We have had our dreams shattered and our hopes for a better tomorrow dashed. Today, the communities of Wales are a far cry from what they were just a year ago. For us, this year (2017) has been a time filled with misery, difficulty, and depression. It pains us that communities and people that were once so vibrant, happy and joyful are now forced to contend with greater unemployment, crime, destitution, misery, staring poverty, and other anti-social behaviour.
Many of us have been able to unable to find jobs. And for those of us who received severance pay, those pitiful sums are quickly drying up as we face rising living costs to meet life’s basic necessities. Even the handful of workers who had purchased vehicles for hire, they now are forced to sell them having found a saturated market with lesser and lesser passengers. Certainly, the grave situation will grow graver in the weeks and months ahead and the people will find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place.
Even in those few instances where some of our colleagues have managed to secure a job, they confront the real situation of lesser wages or reduced work opportunities. The miserable situation has taken its toll on family life as well. Breadwinners are not able to fully meet their family’s needs. This is contributing to heightened anxieties and stress and giving rise to even further challenges in many households.
For our colleague cane cutters, they continue to demand that their right to severance pay is respected and honoured. Disturbingly, the Government and the GuySuCo continues to push our comrades-in-arms to take up work at Uitvlugt Estate. Such an approach is not in keeping with the relevant laws. We are aware that the GAWU has challenged GuySuCo in court on this matter. Disappointingly, several months have gone by and a date for the hearings to commence is yet to be fixed. Given the significance and importance of the matter, and the number of lives who are impacted, we expected that such a matter would have been given high priority.
We also are aware too that a large number of cane cutters, noting that GuySuCo was owned by the state, in the late-July, 2017 appealed to President David Granger to intervene to have their severance pay matter settled. The President responded to the workers in early August, 2017 informing that he had referred the matter to Agriculture Minister, Noel Holder for his attention and that the workers would hear from the ‘goodly’ Minister. Upsettingly, more than two (2) months have gone by and the workers are yet to hear a word from Minister Holder. For us, it seems that the Minister can be least be bothered by the workers concerns and probably is unmoved by the plight they and their family’s face. Nevertheless, we believe that the President, as the Head of State, owes the workers concerned a proper response.
We also recall when the sad closure announcement was made, the Government and GuySuCo sought to soften the devastating blow by telling us that Wales would be transitioned. We were told that ventures involving aquaculture, dairy and beef cattle, livestock, orchards, rice, among other things would be established at Wales. Some of us held out hope that we would have been employed in the touted ventures. But like so many other things we heard and were told about, those hopes were dashed. Besides a small area of paddy absolutely nothing else has been done. Also, we heard that the paddy experiment failed terribly with GuySuCo getting less than half the amount of paddy that an average farmer would receive. This is not good news for the people nor for GuySuCo. It seems that talk about transition was a sad attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the Guyanese people.
For the cane farmers, the situation is equally as terrible. Many farmers who had invested large sums in the farms have been forced to abandon their plots. The road to take the farmers canes from as far as Free and Easy, several miles south of the Wales factory, to Uitvlugt Estate is yet to begin. It seems that the promised all-weather road is a pie in the sky and many farmers remain clueless as to their next move. Even the gantry to facilitate the discharge of farmers cane at Uitvlugt remains incomplete. Some of those components which were removed from Wales some months ago remain neatly packed on the ground near to the Uitvlugt factory. We wonder whether GuySuCo was really serious about what it was saying or was it a case of a promise being a comfort to a fool.
The situation for the people and the villages linked to Wales Estate remains bleak and uncertain. It is steadily growing worse and suffering is growing by the day. The future for the people, especially the youth, is not encouraging. It is difficult for us to imagine the hardships that would befall the people in the in the weeks and months that lie ahead. Many of us wonder every day if this is the ‘Good Life’ we were promised. In this sad time, we call on the Government, as the protector of the people, to provide appropriate financial support to allow us to face up to our challenges and to overcome the difficulties brought about by the sad and wrong decision to close Wales Estate.
Thank you.
