Today (November 27, 2018), over 90 per cent of the field and factory workers of Blairmont Estate downed tools and stayed away from work to call to attention the serious economic circumstances they and their families face now-a-days. Scores of workers took part in a spirited picketing exercise outside of the Estate’s Administrative Office as they called for a pay increase which has been denied to them since 2015. They carried placards reading:-
- 2014 pay rates in 2018 can’t work!
- Workers generating production – pay rise NOW!
- Big boys eating MUTTON, workers eating NOTHING!
- No Closure and Sellout of Blairmont Estate
- 1500 days plus without a pay rise
- Higher Cost-of-Living and Lesser Pay
The workers are seeking for the Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc (GuySuCo) to bring an end to its procrastination in the consideration of their call for a 15 per cent pay increase. They feel that the discriminatory treatment meted out to them with the cognizance of the Government for the past years should no longer be perpetuated.
Indeed, the productive sugar workers are, from all appearances, the most ill-treated group of workers in our nation. At no time in our country’s independent history have they been treated as shabbily as they have been since the Coalition Government took office. The workers have been forced to swallow the bitter pill of a significant fall in their purchasing power occasioned mainly by the onerous new and higher taxes imposed across the country. At the same time, using data from the Corporation’s financial statements, the GAWU, disturbingly, deciphered that between 2014 and 2017,average pay per worker in the sugar industry has declined on average by$284,000. This, for the workers, has been a most difficult double whammy.
Sugar workers are very much upset to know that they remain the only group of workers under the State’s umbrella to have not received any improvement in pay since the APNU+AFC Coalition took office in May, 2015. This is in stark contrast to the promises and commitments our now Government leaders made to them in the lead up to the 2015 National and Regional elections. The disturbing discriminatory treatment of the sugar workers, the GAWU noticed was also recognized by the November 25 Stabroek News editorial which said, inter alia, it is “…unconscionable when one considers that workers in the productive sector, the sugar industry have not been considered for any type of improvement in conditions”.Indeed, in our view, the Stabroek News adequately summed up what seems to be stark discrimination against the sugar workers and their families. The GAWU is at a lost why sugar workers, it seems, have been singled out for such unwarranted and unnecessary treatment. The differing approach to the sugarworkers is glaring and most upsetting. Today, the sugar workers, like all the nation’s workers, have been badly pummelled by the Government’s anti-working class policies and measures.
