WE are writing this open letter to all Parliamentarians as they prepare for budget day on Monday, January 17, 2011. We write as mothers and other professionals, and we are addressing in particular any Parliamentarian who genuinely defends the interests of working people – be they sugar workers, bauxite workers or mothers whose caring work is unwaged and who therefore have to struggle  to find money to feed their children  as vendors,  small farmers, junior nurses or teachers, security guards, domestic workers, sales clerks, receptionists or  shop assistants, or by performing other jobs with low and/or insecure incomes. Very many of these women are single mothers from all race groups. A few of them have spouses but all – all are struggling for survival.
A letter written and signed by a group of women who are old age pensioners, people on public assistance, security guards and domestic workers, which was published in Kaieteur News and Stabroek News on December 3, 2010, under the caption, “Why should we be forced to live like this?”, showed in detail why all of them find it impossible to live on the income they receive. Red Thread assisted the women who wrote that letter to organise themselves and we recorded their stories, views and demands. We assisted them because their struggle is our struggle and it is the struggle of the majority of unwaged and waged women workers in Guyana. Whether you as a parliamentarian are guided by your politics, your religious beliefs, or both, you cannot in good conscience continue to accept a situation in which the rich get richer and richer every day while the daily income of an old age pensioner  is insufficient to buy a loaf of bread, the daily income of a mother on public assistance can’t buy a pint of oil, security guards have to work  shifts of 12 hours for only $100 – $105 an hour, domestic workers get as low as $4500 per week and shop assistants  get $5000 – $6000 per week.  Is this injustice not against your professed beliefs?
If the answer is yes, then let this guide the changes you press for in the 2011 budget. Listen to the budget presentation as though you were one of the women who wrote that December 3 letter:
* A mother who is forced to leave her children unsupervised and unprotected for long hours to do work for money in a job that takes her miles away from her home, often against her will.
* A woman with a disability or one caring for a relative with a disability, having to do the extra work of coping with homes and minibuses and public places and streets that are never designed with people with disabilities in mind – and to do all this on that inhumane level of public assistance.
* A security guard forced to work under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions,  sometimes sent to work at desolate sites with merely a baton as a defense, working for shifts of 12 hours and even 18 hours when there is no one to relieve her.
* A domestic worker who has to wash, clean, cook, iron and sometimes care  for a child or an older or sick person  in other people’s homes for as little as $4,500 per week out of which she has to pay transport.
* An old age pensioner who has made her contribution to this economy and is still making it, who has to pay a rent of  $3000 – $6,000 per month out of her monthly pension of $6,600  plus other essential expenses and so is  forced to walk to and from home to a church from Monday to Friday just to be able to get some food and on weekends and holidays has somehow to find her own food.
And given the recent demolition of the stalls of many vendors and the insecurity into which all vendors have been thrown, to this list we add, put yourself in the place of a vendor who is prevented from making a legal living for herself and children in the name of curbing illegality.
Listen to the budget presentation from their perspective so that if you are told for example, that a rise in old age pensions is being proposed which will cost the treasury billions of dollars,  you move yourself away from that abstraction and ask yourself what the rise will mean in the life of one pensioner. How many loaves of bread will her share buy her?
Listen to the budget presentation from the point of view of the mothers and other professionals.