Teachers across Guyana are putting their ethnic, racial and political differences aside and are standing united against the PPP Government, demanding an improved quality of life through increased wages, salaries and allowances. This, according to renowned economist, Dr Clive Thomas, is a true representation of a common interest-a demand for a livable wage.
While the government has been branding the countrywide strike a political action initiated by the parliamentary opposition, Dr Thomas has shown that teachers are in fact fighting for survival in an economy, buttressed by the oil and gas sector, is considered the fastest growing in the world.
The strike, on its final day of a planned two-week exercise, has seen shockingly overwhelming support from every region across Guyana, including areas known to be political strongholds of the government. Dr Thomas said this could not be political. In fact, he said the strike reminds one of a period during the 1970s and 1980s when multiracial politics was normal..
“I had believed over the last year or so, that it would have been difficult to constitute having struggles around common interests like improved livable wages for workers. I thought it would be difficult to reinvigorate those times. But I was very happy to see it has happened. All the photographs I have seen have been pleasing in the fact that they covered a wide spectrum of Guyanese,” Dr Thomas shared, during his appearance on the live online programme Politics 101 with Dr David Hinds, Thursday.
Dr Thomas said the coming together of Guyanese in this strength is a very hopeful sign for him. A former trade unionist himself, Dr Thomas said there is a linkage between the fight for better wages and conditions and a more just society.
“There can be no separation between the two. They are trying to improve their material condition of life, but they are also trying to improve their status, their rights , their ability to have cultural expressions, their desire, their hopes, their dreams in a just system that allows them to transform themselves. There is no separation. The fight for bread is a fight for equality,” Dr Thomas said of the teachers’ industrial action.
He said what is coming into focus is the distributional problems within the country, about who gets what in the share and who and whom are equally important.
“And that is at the heart of the strike of the teachers because they fight for a living wage, they are fighting for the advancement of the relative position in the economy as a whole,” he underscored, pointing out that there is a large sum of money coming from the windfall of oil. He said Guyanese have to fight for their share of it.
Asked where he sees the industrial action going, Dr Thomas said it is regrettable that the government is trying to make the strike a “battle of attrition”, that is, a sustained process of wearing down teachers to the extent that their will to fight collapses and where the government thinks it has the upper hand because it has the money.
He said he thought a more professional attitude would have been exhibited by the government to make way for more professional discussions with the union, especially now since Guyana is Petro state with a trillion dollar budget.
Instead, he said the administration is more concerned with defeating the union politically.
“Most of it is because they are totally surprised by the turnout. They probably never expected that their people would have an interest in the living wage dimension of their lives strike against them and they are hoping to break their strike in that way.” (Politics 101)
