Dear Editor,
Guysuco brags that it is packaging sugar and selling on the local market at a huge profit. The company boasts sugar is sweet again as the government newspaper headline screamed.
This is not something to boast about. Workers are paying the higher price for the sugar. Cheddi Jagan would never allow it.
Price of (packaged) sugar has gone up. Who are affected? Local consumers, the working class and the poor? Costs of producing sugar have been passed on to the working class and the poor. That is the CEO and Guysuco’s idea of increasing revenues and making a profit. They pass on the costs to the workers and the poor in order to generate a profit. Guysuco increases expenditures with salaries for a bloated management and the poor working class have to pay for it.
This is not an achievement to brag about. It is a retrograde action. Having resolved the industrial action at Guysuco, will the Vice President allow the costs of sugar to be passed on to the poor?
Packaging sugar for local consumption has taken away jobs and income from local people. The purchase of bulk sugar from Guysuco provided jobs and income for small business up until a few months ago. Jobs have been lost because shops can’t purchase bulk sugar and package it on their own as has been the norm for over a century. If the coalition had done this, Jagdeo and his PPP would have raised hell.
The rich, including some managers and maybe even the CEO of Guysuco, is not affected by packaged sugar. They consume refined imported packaged sugar and don’t care the hoot about costs. The value added of imported sugar is overseas, not in Guyana. The manager of Guysuco and the rich can afford value added imported sugar with their $1M to $3M monthly salary. The sugar workers can’t afford refined sugar with their $80K monthly salary.
Guysuco sugar is clearly not sweet for the working class and poor.
Yours truly
Jagnarine Kumar Singh
