The Hustle!
Kaieteur News – The Leader of the Opposition knows full well that the government cannot announce increases to public servants in the Budget. He knows all too well that if he does this, he will be the first to question their attachment to collective bargaining with the union representing public servants.
Employees would have loved learning about progress. They got nothing in 2020, thanks to the same Opposition that kept the country locked up for five months and forced a late crisis Budget.
The Opposition should therefore be the last to be plugging for any increases to public servants. He hardly did it himself while in government. The teachers had run around royalty before agreeing to an increase and his actions deprived public servants of progress in 2020.
Public sector workers do not waste time, waiting for any increases. They sit, mop and wait with hands folded on the PPP tradition of imposing a 12-month retrospective increase at Christmas. In fact, many of them prefer to receive the increase in arrears at Christmas than in January and get nothing extra for the holiday season.
Guyanese workers are not in the mood to be waiting in vain. Many are busy. Some work in the office by day and hold their hands at night doing a part-time job, or busy whenever they can.
Public servants work in offices which, when they leave work in the afternoon, drive to various car parks and pick up a “load” of passengers. This is how they earn extra dollars.
Some of them get their relatives to send things in barrels and they pedal to their work colleagues. Some prepare meals and snacks and take them to the office and sell. Workers are not waiting for government progress; they are very busy.
Others are looking for greener pastures. If another job pays better, they jump at the opportunity. They are not opposed to risk-taking. Those who are afraid of venturing who get stuck in endless jobs who go nowhere and pay next to nothing.
The Guyana Public Service Union recently called for a 25 percent increase in wages.
Workers have long been learning to move on to better things. There are far too many options available for public employees to even think about industrial action. These options are the reasons why there is always a severe labor shortage in the sugar industry.
Many sugar workers are now working for more money doing soft labor in businesses and on minibuses. This is less strenuous and more rewarding than the daunting task of cutting cans on the estates. Many are under construction and some prefer to make a few buying and selling and make good money from their small kitchen gardens. The sugar workers, by far the most oppressed workers in Guyana, are moving on. Instead of intense industrial upheaval, they join the bandwagon and do busy elsewhere.
But there is an even better option open to Guyanese workers. If you have a family living outside Guyana you can always call them up, tell them that things are tough in Guyana and you don’t have ones to eat some days.
When they ask why you don’t have a job, you can tell them that since the PPP / C came into force, there are no jobs available. As suckers they go down each month to the money transfer office and send you some American dollars that you spend in sports and drinking with your friends as they work their toes to make the sacrifice to send money to you.
Guyanese in the Diaspora suck for a sad story. They will send you money regularly enough and enough that you can retire early and live Riley’s life.
The effects of all these options provide little or no incentive or incentive to strike or incentivize an increase in earnings.
The government knows all this and has already decided that five percent is good enough every year. That’s the enchanting figure of the PPP / C and that’s likely to be proposed in November.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)