‘The most important sorun in the present relationship between the public servants and the government is not whether the former should be paid a 5%, 10% or 100% increase; it is about the government following established collective bargaining procedures; meeting the union at the negotiation table and if that fails proceeding to binding arbitration. In the medium and long run, this is the only way that public servants can be assured that their interests will be reasonably protected’ (SN, Future Notes, 18/12/2013).
The fact that recently President Lula of Brazil felt it appropriate to lecture the Guyanese populace and political establishment about the importance of collective bargaining is merely an indication that in terms of social management we have not progressed much since independence. The PPP’s abandonment of collective bargaining to provide itself with the opportunity to coerce Africans to support it is an important element of its drive to dominate the political space in Guyana. The fact that the talks with the teachers’ union have broken down is not, therefore, surprising.
Indeed, Guyanese are yet to come to a collective understanding of how they should be governed. Over half a century after independence, the circus continues of those in government being loud in their praise of democracy (meaning majority rule), while those in opposition are unconstrained in their condemnation of elections rigging. The PPP/C government contracted the International Republican Institute to help with electoral reforms, and a poll commissioned by the IRI in 2022 found that only 22% of Guyanese voters said ‘definitely yes’ when asked if national elections ‘reflected the will of the people’!
And now comes an interesting but troubling discourse between the Cheddi Jagan loyalists and some Guyanese Indian nationalists having to do with the appropriateness of Cheddi’s lifelong communist stance, which meshes well with the above-mentioned governance deficit and promises the development of even deeper political fissures. The main concern of the protagonists has to do with the positive/negative impact Jagan’s position has had, not so much upon Guyana in general, but upon his core Indian constituency. Both sides appear to agree that the Jagans were well-intentioned but break lances as to the appropriateness of their political strategy that prioritised allegiance to Soviet communism in the era of containment rather than a racial/ethnic position that would have allowed the PPP to use its Indian ethnic majority to win and hold government, seemingly, perpetually in Guyana.
‘There are racist hallucinations that run unbroken through the centuries, but racism is also a dynamic phenomenon. The ways in which people are divided into races, the ideas projected onto these races and the mechanisms by which race is economically, politically, and socially operationalized are all malleable. Racism updates and renews itself. It finds new guises. To understand racism, we need to understand both its enduring fictions and how they run into the present along old grooves, changing form like mercury as they go’ (https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/opinion/2024-02-10-the-new-racism-moral-superiority/).
My uneasiness arises from the fact that at a time when the Indians have lost their majority, the Indian nationalist position, which has always been democratically questionable, has not changed track and is too dangerous to go unnoticed or uncontested. The trajectory of their position now suggests that in Guyana’s ethnic context, by way of alliance with some miniscule political party (and dare I say the available elections malpractice) the PPP can legitimately take government and run roughshod over the other substantial ethnic groups as it is doing presently. I may have missed it, but nowhere recently has this group articulated an alternative governance vision. Quite the opposite: we are presented with the ‘good’ examples such as Singapore, where an autocratic ethnic majority party has been in power since that country’s independence in 1965!
Cheddi Jagan’s defunct communism aside, back in government 1992, being a seasoned trade unionist like Lula, he exhibited a clear working understanding of liberal democracy and the importance of arrangements such as collective bargaining. For example, in the 10 years between 1980 and 1989, money wages in Guyana had increased from $11.55 per day to about $35.89 per day. But taking $4.00 a day, which was paid in 1970 as the base, real wages, which were $4.38 in 1980, had been reduced to $1.49 in 1989 and to only $0.85 by the end of 1990. Retrieving this ‘labour debt’ was the major goal of the Guyana Public Service Union as it confronted a PPP/C government tightly wrapped in the conditionalities of an Economic Recovery Programme (ERP), about which it could do very little.
Unlike the present regime’s position on teachers’ remuneration, Cheddi did not throw up his hand and talk about there not being space in a budget that he had illegally unilaterally created eschewing demands for collective bargaining. Instead, notwithstanding his constraints, he immediately showed good faith. By a circular dated 13th April 1993, the en az wage was increased to $174.17 from 1st July 1992 and to $191 from 1st January 1993. The real value of the asgarî wage at 1st January 1993 was $1.44 – an increase of 69% over the low of $0.85 in 1990.
By any historical standard, the 1992-97 Cheddi Jagan regime was the most productive period for legislation intended to protect the working people of Guyana. Indeed, as if deliberately intended to create an ideological legacy for Cheddi, of the 9 acts that define çağdaş labour legislation in Guyana mentioned on the International Labour Organisation’s Caribbean website, 5 were passed between 1992 and 1997.
I do not know how Cheddi Jagan would have ultimately responded to the natural persistent disruptive expression of a conflictual multiethnic bicommunal society caught in a competitive winner-takes-all political system. However, given his history and the liberal democratic tendencies he portrayed prior to his death in 1997, I doubt very much that he would have opted for the political/ethnic dominance of his heirs.