Push people, and push people, and push people, and there comes that moment when they bend and break. Or they boomerang back with a strike to the face of their oppressors. Plumb on the nose. Push too long, and push too hard, and there comes that breaking point: people can’t take anymore. Their choices are stark: bow in abject surrender. Or stand up and take the struggle to the tent of the tormentor. This was where the teachers of Guyana were, and this why they are out on the streets across this country.
It takes a considerable amount of rejection, an incredible degree of disrespect, to push teachers out of their classrooms, away from their young charges. The PPP Government has earned distinctions in the sustained delivery of rejections and disrespect meted out to teachers. From the government’s side, the sense is of ‘we do the talking, we take charge of the directing, and we will own all that goes with producing. A narrative intended to soothe, while misleading the general public on what the key issues are, and what has been done about them. Try pay for a start. The government has been pleased with itself to hand down the equivalent of ‘take it or leave it.’ Yes, it is that business involving a 6.5% increase, and teachers should count themselves lucky to be the beneficiaries of such generosity. Many have been the cry about sheer naked power on display (unilateralism), and still more exhibitions of arrogance (imposition) that has become the political and leadership norm.
All the conventions and labor relations cultures have been diluted, degraded, and damaged, but there is this blabber and buffoonery from the top down about rights of the people, place of the people, and concern about the people. Towering planks dot the landscape, and stand as irrefutable evidence of where the patrimony money is going. And who gets the cream and the prime succulents cuts from it. They don’t include teachers, and the broader bands of public servants. They are an afterthought, a nuisance that has to be given something to shut them up, and make them fade away. A number like 6.5% has a good ring to it. Add some classroom cash to patch and plaster over yawning gaps, and there is a record of having done so much for the now so many ungrateful out on the streets, and creating a bigger problem for everyone.
These strikers are teachers, and they clearly have much to learn, are in need of some teaching themselves. Any spurious argument can be found to boost any specious case. The PPP Government has developed a long track record with such antics, tricks, and gimmicks, to the extent of now standing as masters of the deception game. The leadership of the government has to have more than a fair idea that the Guyanese people are seeing through the smokescreens and sleaze that have become the central characteristics of this government. Look at the treatment being handed out to the custodians of the nation’s youth. They have to reduce themselves to begging to have their case heard. Pay. For pointing to pressing for improved working conditions, they are isolated and targeted. Then they are demonized and pulverized. Pay will be deducted from striking teachers for daring to walk off the job in the face of impositions that tyrannize and pauperize. And, as if that is not enough, the bottom has to be unleashed and inflicted on teachers to drain their will, and that of their recognized representatives. It is the petty now official: union dues will no longer be deducted. Let that be a lesson for crossing paths and swords with a government that is meaner than a stepped-upon snake.
I think the government has been wounded, and it only has itself to blame. If only there is more listening, there is some respectful and sincere engagement. At least the PPP Government is worried. Deal with people like they are people. Not only the corrupt contractor class is made of people. Or the private sector that can celebrate lavishly, given the riches from the government (budget) that have cascaded on its members heads. Public servants count as citizens, and so do minimum wage labor, and part-time unskilled workers at the bottom of the pile. There really ought to be a mass movement emerging from the first steps taken by teachers. The PPP Government and its peacock proud leadership either teaches itself to treat those they convert into enemies for their divisive and perverse purposes. Or both will learn the hard way. I go back to how this writing started. It is a fact of life, through all seasons and many contexts, that the afflicted and mistreated will only take so much for so long. After that, matters have a way of taking a life of their own. Most times, they are uncontrollable, as the point of no return has been passed.
My recommendation maintains the same unchanging texture, regardless of the context. It is better to sit across a table, than to stare at each other across a fence, and from foxholes with a different kind of language heard. Talk to find common grounds of understanding that encourages reciprocity. Converse to close gaps, which could lift everyone out of a bad situation that delights none, but the craven and the utterly abominable. We have those in Guyana, and they have concluded that they are unstoppable, that anything goes, and that everybody has to take it. Wiser men have made lesser mistakes, and the cost was high and enduring. It is imperative that the PPP Government abandon the road of confrontation that it believes is in its favor. Misjudgment is the mother of miscalculation.
