This morning (June 27, 2018), several workers and pensioners of Uitvlugt Estate took part in a picketing exercise outside of the Estate’s Administrative office to call on the GuySuCo to put an end to coerce them to have their wages and pensions be sent to the bank. The protesters related that the Corporation has been ignoring their sincere concerns regarding its demand, if not edict. 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 is an illegal act by itself, the 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 protestors shared with GAWU that they have indicated to GuySuCo that going in the direction they seek will place greater pressures on them. They informed that they will now be forced to expend several hundred dollars weekly in order to travel to the banks located at Vreed-en-Hoop and Parika to withdraw their wages. They worry too that they may be forced to make more than one trip should ATMs be inoperable when they wish to engage in their transaction. Apart from that cost, they would incur charges to withdraw their wages which are far from princely. Most recently, the GAWU noted that one bank increased its withdrawal fees and, we want to believe, that the other banks may well follow suit. They 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.
Apart from those challenges, difficult as they may be, the pensioners and the workers said they also pointed out to the Estate Management the real possibility and fear of being a robbed after they exit the bank. Media reports have advised about similar occurrences in recent times. They shared too that vendors, who set up shop near to the pay offices on pay day, would be disadvantaged as well.
Apart from the very compelling reasons advanced, the Corporation’s thrust runs contrary to the Labour Act which requires at Section 19(1) that wages be paid in money. But apart from that, the Act goes on, at Section 19(4) to mandate employers to pay wages at convenient places near to the workplace. This is noteworthy and the Corporation, we believe, should not ignore this fact nor the workers reasonable positions.
The GAWU stands with the workers and the pensioners and calls on the Corporation 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 (3) years.
