By Rehana Ahamad

EMPLOYEES of the Guyana Oil Company (GuyOil) have resumed work with the hope that the entity’s management would reconsider its position and agree to wages and salary increases come March.

The workers, who downed tools just before the holidays, resumed work on Christmas Eve Day, following what was described as a fruitful intervention from the Ministry of Labour, headed by Minister Joseph Hamilton.
According to President of the Clerical and Commercial Workers’ Union (CCWU) Sherwood Clarke, both the Union and GuyOil were summoned to a reconciliation meeting, where a decision was taken to defer consultations to March 31, 2021, which marks the end of the first quarter of the year.

According to Clarke, both parties, at the time of the last meeting, had maintained their earlier stance.
“The management is offering zero increases, and the Union is sticking to its position, and demanding eight per cent, based on appraisal, or five per cent increase across the board,” Clarke told the Guyana Chronicle on Monday.
In addition to wages and salary increases, some 300 unionised GuyOil workers countrywide were also expecting Christmas bonuses, all of which was initially agreed to by the company’s previous Board of Directors in July 2019.
The relatively new General Manager of the oil company, Trevor Bassoo, had defended the company’s withdrawal from the agreement, explaining that even though GuyOil empathises with its workers, it is not financially able to abide by a previous decision to give increases in wages and salaries. This, he said, was owing to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that had taken a devastating toll on the economy. The company’s struggles, he noted, were further compounded by the national curfews and lockdowns instituted in 2020.

“The situation at this point in time does not allow us, or permit us, to issue any of those two specific forms of remuneration that the union requested,” Bassoo noted in a previous interview with this publication.
Meanwhile, the union’s president continued to insist that the oil company had been operating at a profit, and can therefore afford to give back to its deserving employees.

“These are essential workers being denied; at the extraordinary meeting, they agreed that as long as the company made profits, the increases would be paid. They had their recent AGM, and declared $2.9B as profit,” Clarke specified.

He also defended the workers’ request for Christmas bonuses. “GuyOil workers are considered frontline workers. They didn’t take days off and stay indoors; they continued their work,” Clarke told this newspaper.
Meanwhile, Chief Labour Officer Charles Ogle had previously expressed the ministry’s commitment to facilitating respectful and considerate negotiations between the two parties.
CCWU’s Clarke is hopeful that within the next few weeks, the management of GuyOil would find some way to honour the initial agreement made with staff.
“We have to keep our fingers crossed, and try to be as optimistic as we possibly can,” a hopeful Clarke said.