…as House approves $1.9B

THE National Assembly on Friday afternoon approved the sum of $1.93B to offset the payment of severance for sugar workers made redundant by the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), and the opposition expressed appreciation to the government for the payout in a rare show of bipartisanship in the House.

The sum is an increase from the $1.75B initially tabled the day before, and Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan told the Committee of Supply, the figure was arrived at following Cabinet’s deliberations earlier in the day.
The government has made a commitment to pay a sum of $2.25B to the sugar workers before the end of this month, a figure that represents half of the $4.25B it plans paying the workers. The balance will be paid before the end of 2018.

Minister of Agriculture, Noel Holder, in briefing the Opposition on the budgetary allocation, gave a breakdown of the sums to be paid to each sugar estate this month. In the case of the Skeldon Estate, those workers will receive $609M, while those at Rose Hall will be paid $705M. The workers at East Demarara and Wales will be paid $815M and $150M, respectively.

Flanked by executives of the sugar corporation, Holder told the National Assembly that the sums to be paid this month will see a total of 4,763 sugar workers being paid off, 1851 are from Skeldon; another 1181 from Rose Hall; 1480 from East Demerara; and the remaining 251 from the Wales Estate.

In the interest of the workers, Cabinet has put forward a proposal in which it has made a commitment to pay full severance to those workers whose total severance stands at $500,000 or less. Around 1600 workers in this category will benefit.

Minister Holder said that the severance payments include overtime and other allowances owed to the workers. He also noted that the severance is being paid to workers, on condition of length of service, adding: “All benefits will be paid on the due date.”

Pressed further by the Opposition, Minister Holder noted that he is well aware of the laws governing the payment of severance, and that notices were served to the workers regarding severance.
He said, too, that there are personnel at GuySuCo, such as security workers, who are receiving their salaries as per normal. He said that of the total number of workers who were made redundant, 143 were senior staff members.

When the legislation approving the severance increase, appropriately named the Supplementary Appropriation Bill, was passed in the National Assembly on Friday afternoon, some members of the Opposition expressed appreciation to the government for the payout.

President David Granger, in a message to the National Assembly earlier this month said that GuySuCo has been in a state of crisis for over 25 years, and that the government has acted “resolutely and responsibly to protect the livelihood of workers, to preserve the viability of rural communities and prevent the further financial depletion of the country’s treasury.”

The President said he noted that the government, not only his, has over the years struggled to maintain the industry’s viability by engaging international advisory, technical and managerial corporations such as Booker-Tate Ltd, Bosch Projects (PTY) and Global Cane Sugar, between 1992 and 2015; erecting a new factory at Skeldon in the East Berbice-Corentyne Region at a cost of US$121M; expending G$48.02B in financial support to the industry since 2011, and G$32B over the past 30 months – at a rate of about one billion dollars a month.

The President also noted that his administration has engaged 500 employees from the West and East Demerara estates, with over 100 of them signalling their willingness to be retrained in fields such as carpentry, masonry, plumbing, mechanical and electrical works, and small business enterprises.

The government, he said, will continue to engage stakeholders such as GuySuCo, GAWU, and the National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees (NAACIE) and the workers.