But the dispute over wages is only the tip of the iceberg of sugar workers' discontent. Their revered “custom-and-practice” benefits have all been whittled away in the industry's thrust to cut costs. These benefits were won through blood, sweat and tears of hard struggle that started as far back as during slavery: it is not oft told that the slaves fought incessantly – not only in the vaunted “uprisings” to protest their working conditions. The annual production incentive (API) is under threat as the powers-that-be have decided that bonuses would be awarded on profitability rather than production. The irony, of course, is that unionised workers have absolutely no control over profitability – since it is upper management who decides, for instance, to sell sugar to CARICOM at less than the cost of production - and boast about finding “new markets”. The productivity of workers (measured in the number of workers necessary to produce a ton of sugar) had more than doubled since 1990 –excluding the gains obtained through the limited introduction of mechanisation.

The entire draconian regime that has been imposed on the sugar industry is the work of the Government of the day, since the Government owns 100% of the industry. The President, for example, signed a memorandum with the World Bank since 2001, which promises to hold annual wage increase to 5% regardless of other factors. This is a done deal. The Government has also set as one of the goals of GUYSUCO the need to bring in as much foreign currency as possible. Not to bring in as much profits as possible but as much “foreign currency” as possible. Thus, even if the sugar is sold at a loss abroad, management is complying with its prime imperative of bringing in foreign currency. So much for free enterprise orientation and there goes any chance of workers obtaining real raises!

But sugar workers know all of this. They have a sugar union – GAWU – that has given them all the vocabulary necessary to talk about “exploitation”. GAWU's dues are deducted from workers' pay packets at the same time as the Government's taxes – and the workers have as little say about the union's deduction as they do with the Government's taxes. The workers' sporadically call for the formation of a new union to represent their interests as they are doing once again. But it will be for naught. And why is this so?

Most of the sugar workers in the fields are Indians – even though there is a growing number of Africans, even women, who are trudging back into the scene of their violations. During the last elections, I spoke to some sugar workers in front of the Rose Hall Plantation pay-office. They recited their litany of woes about working conditions and poor pay. They were even aware of moves to shift the grinding of their canes to Blairmont and Albion which would mean the closure of the Rose Hall factory. But their concerns about their livelihood – and the survival of their spouses and children – were far outweighed by their concern about the survival of the PPP Government. They want a union to oppose GAWU and bargain – with the Government ultimately – for greater equity and justice for themselves but they would not brook any challenge to the Government. The incongruity that the executives of GAWU are part and parcel of the PPP, and that the General Secretary of the PPP sits on the Board of Directors of GUYSUCO did not cut any ice. As MLA Khan, President of the Guyana Sugar Workers' Union (GSWU) said during the 1999-2000 effort to challenge GAWU, the workers wanted someone to fight the “son” even as they elected the “father”, who set up all the rules that they objected to. They refuse to take the logical step of seeing that the PPP would accept challenges to GAWU from no quarter – not just a “political” one, because GAWU forms part and parcel of their “front” recruitment organisations, and any challenge would have political repercussions. But why do the workers have this blind-spot?

The majority of sugar workers are caught up in the larger bind of their ethnic security dilemma. The sugar workers may suffer from cognitive dissonance but they are not crazy: at the cognitive level they know that the PPP Government ultimately has to bear responsibility for their abysmal wages and conditions. But once any challenge for their betterment comes from any entity that also challenges the PPP, they would have none of it, since their greater fear is that the PNC will replace the PPP and take over the Government. As a boy, I thought that Arthur Lewis was overreacting when in the early sixties he reviewed the future of the minority African-Guyanese within the Westminster political system and asked, “Upon counting heads, are the African Guyanese to be liquidated?” I thought that the word “liquidated” was a bit too much but in the years since I have come to appreciate the depth of the fears in both the Indians and African Guyanese when they make decisions as to “who rules”.

“Plights” are distinguished from “problems” in that the former are seen as acts of God or nature against which there is little that man can do but rail. The ethnic security dilemmas operating in Guyana serve to make the ordinary Guyanese see his situation as a plight. It is up to the political and other workers not only to rail against the quotidian injustices but also to explain that they face “problems”, which, after all, are made by men and can be solved by men.