There is something deeply unsettling about the image of nurses celebrating Labour Day with the Government of Guyana at a State House breakfast while the same government presides over a health system in which many local nurses still cannot afford the dignity of independent living.
Labour Day is not supposed to be a photo opportunity. It is supposed to be a reminder of struggle. It is supposed to honour the workers who fought for wages, safety, respect, collective bargaining and the right to live decently from the labour of their own hands.
For nurses in Guyana, that struggle is far from over.
The history is clear. Nurses have not suddenly begun asking for fair wages. Their demands sit inside a long public-sector wage struggle. The Guyana Nurses Association was formed in 1928 and is the oldest nurses’ association in the English-speaking Caribbean.
The Guyana Public Service Union has also carried decades of wage battles on behalf of public servants, including nurses. In 1999, public servants endured a 57-day strike after government offered 4.6 percent while the union sought 40 percent. That struggle eventually produced the Armstrong Arbitration Award, which GPSU says granted a 57.6 percent salary increase over 1999 and 2000.
Since then, nurses have repeatedly returned to the public square. In 2013, Linden nurses protested over unpaid gratuities. That same year, nurses at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation protested the government’s imposed five percent increase. Linden health workers also struck over the five percent increase and over other conditions, including deductions connected to maternity-related gratuity payments.
By 2015, nurses were openly pleading for better salaries, better working conditions and better training. At the time, one Linden nurse said health workers were being paid between GY$40,000 and GY$85,000, while the starting salary for a registered nurse at GPHC was about GY$67,000 after tax.
Then came COVID, and the country discovered again what it should never have forgotten: nurses are essential. They held the system together at personal risk. They faced sick patients, long hours, fear, exhaustion and exposure. Yet in 2020, nurses and health workers were still protesting for better salaries, better working conditions and proper risk allowances. GPH workers demanded a 50 percent salary increase and said the promised risk allowance was inadequate. Another report noted that nurses were seeking a risk allowance of GY$50,000 and a significant increase in base salary, while gross salaries for nurses at GPH were reported in the range of GY$74,000 to GY$104,000.
Government will point, correctly, to salary adjustments made in 2022. Staff nurses moved from a minimum salary of GY$111,628 to GY$169,438. Staff nurse/midwives moved from GY$127,963 to GY$195,000. Those increases were necessary. But necessary is not the same as sufficient.
A nurse cannot pay rent with government talking points. A nurse cannot buy food with a press release. A nurse cannot build a life on ceremonial praise.
This is where the national contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. Guyana is now an oil economy. The country speaks daily of transformation, prosperity, new highways, new hospitals, new hotels, new communities and national development. The IMF has reported that Guyana’s economic expansion is being driven by oil production and strong non-oil growth, with the economy expected to grow significantly in the coming years.
But what does oil wealth mean to a nurse who cannot afford a modest apartment near her workplace? Private rental listings show unfurnished apartments advertised at GY$100,000+ per month and furnished apartments at GY$300,000+ per month. Even where cheaper apartments exist, the broader reality is clear: rent, food, transportation and family responsibilities consume salaries quickly. Statistics Guyana reported that food was a major driver of inflation in 2025, including a 4.6 percent food increase in June alone.
This is why nurses leave. They do not leave because they lack patriotism. They leave because patriotism does not pay rent. They leave because their training has value in countries that are willing to pay for it. They leave because they are tired of being praised as heroes and paid as if their sacrifice is unlimited.
The migration of nurses from Guyana is not a new concern. A 2007 scholarly article on the international migration of nurses and midwives used Guyana as an example of how nurse migration can affect the viability of a country’s health-care system. Nearly two decades later, Guyana is still discussing the same problem.
Instead of confronting the wage problem at its root, the government has moved toward importing nurses. In 2023, reports indicated that Guyana planned to import nurses to address shortages. In 2024, reports stated that government approved the recruitment of 500 Bangladeshi nurses. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo said imported workers would receive the same salaries paid to Guyanese and argued that shortages justified foreign recruitment.
But that does not answer the deeper question. If Guyana has a shortage of nurses because nurses are migrating for better pay, then importing nurses is not a workforce strategy. It is a wage strategy. It expands labour supply without fixing the conditions that pushed local nurses out in the first place. Even if foreign nurses are paid the same formal salary, the policy can still weaken the bargaining power of Guyanese nurses by reducing pressure on government to raise wages to a truly competitive level.
That is why the Labour Day breakfast image is so ironic.
On May 1, 2026, President Ali hosted workers at State House and spoke about worker ownership, investment incentives and dignity in retirement. Those are fine sentiments. But for nurses, dignity must begin with the wage packet. Before a nurse can invest in national projects, she must be able to invest in her own life. Before she can think about retirement, she must survive the month. Before she can celebrate Labour Day with politicians, she must know that her labour is respected in the national budget.
The government cannot continue to treat nurses as symbols while managing them as costs. It cannot build new hospitals and fail to retain the people who make hospitals function. It cannot speak of world-class health care while asking nurses to live on salaries that cannot keep pace with the oil economy around them.
Guyana needs a serious nurse-retention strategy. That means a living wage for nurses, not periodic percentage increases that disappear into rent and food. It means housing support, transportation support, safe working conditions, professional development, specialization pathways, rural and hinterland incentives, childcare support, and transparent collective bargaining. It means treating nursing as a national security profession, not as a line item to be managed down.
Most of all, it means respecting the basic truth that no health system can rise above the condition of its nurses.
Labour Day should not be reduced to breakfast with power. It should be a reckoning with power. And the question for Guyana is simple: in the richest period of our national history, why are the women and men who care for our sick still being forced to beg, protest, migrate or make do?
A country that cannot keep its nurses cannot honestly claim to be building a modern health system. A government that imports nurses while local nurses struggle to afford rent is not solving a shortage. It is avoiding a wage crisis.
And the nurses smiling at a Labour Day breakfast deserve more than applause. They deserve justice.
