Mr. SEEPAUL Narine’s letter in yesterday’s Chronicle provides the final piece of evidence required that the leadership of the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) has abandoned the last shreds of decency and has joined the ranks of the PNCR in using the dirtiest of tricks in an attempt to mislead the people of Guyana.

In particular, the act of invoking Dr. Jagan’s name in its quest to justify its own irresponsible and ineffectual leadership is shameless and vulgar on the part of the current Union leadership.
Indeed, in order to distort the numerical results of its analysis, it includes unashamedly four years of PNC misrule, 1989 to 1992, to which it adds the five years of Dr. Jagan’s presidency, to arrive at its conclusions. In other words, Seepaul Narine, and the one or two intellectual masters to whom he answers, are happy adding four years of PNC misrule to five years of Dr. Jagan’s presidency to create a distorted result to fool sugar workers.
What they fail to say is that over the period from 1997 to 2009 under, successively, Samuel Hinds, Janet Jagan, and Bharrat Jagdeo presidencies, sugar workers have been granted accumulated increases of 146.9 percent.
What they also fail to say is that, on top of the workers getting increases totalling 146.9 percent over the period from 1997 to 2009, the Government actually injected US$157 million into the industry during the years from 2003 to 2010. This injection went principally to support capital investments aimed at increasing production and productivity. Despite this, production actually declined from 280,000 tonnes in 1996 to 230,000 in 2010. In fact, instead of coming down as a result of the capital investments made, the labour cost per tonne of sugar has actually increased by 56 percent over the years from 2002 to 2010.
The conclusion is inescapable. Seepaul Narine and his friends, who sit in their comfortable offices on High Street far away from the sugar workers, are clearly removed from reality and have gone into bed with the PNC.
They may think that they can take the workers for granted. But, they are wrong. No wonder sugar workers are increasingly seeing through their attempts to sabotage the industry, are rejecting their calls, and are turning out to work.