PLEASE permit me a space in your newspaper to highlight the continued poor management, manifested in the sugar industry. In 2002 it was reported at the General Council meeting of the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union ( GAWU ) that a Punt Dumper broke down which forced the LBI Factory to cease operations for a long period.
In the process of the repair work, millions of dollars were lost, the shaft of the Punt Dumper snapped. A new shaft was fabricated on a lathe in the LBI Factory. It should not have taken longer than four (4) hours to fabricate and refit the shaft. However, the shaft was not correctly fabricated due to gross incompetence. The spines which were fabricated at one end of the shaft should have been at the other end. With the incorrectly fabricated shaft, the punt dumper was put in motion only to have the shaft and the fittings loosened and hit a worker who suffered a fractured leg.
It took many hours for the supervisory personnel to discover that the shaft was incorrectly fabricated. By the time a correctly fabricated shaft was fitted on the dumper to allow operations to continue, twenty-eight hours had elapsed. What a cost to the sugar corporation due to incompetence? Thousands of dollars were lost to pay factory workers who were made idle and there was a lost of over two hundred (200) tons of sugar worth $39 M due to non-performance of the factory for that period. The factory produces 8.5 tones of sugar an hour.
The time has come that every act of incompetence and neglect, to end. There should be a technical person on the Board of Directors to investigate matters like the punt dumper. Unless stern actions are taken against those who are incompetent and delinquent in their duties, the Sugar Industry will continue to suffer losses. The losers will always be the ordinary workers.