Dear Editor,
When the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) released its statement on 25 September rejecting government claims that public-sector wage increases risk hyperinflation, I found myself agreeing with the historical argument while growing steadily more uneasy about what followed it. The coalition is right that Guyana’s own record undercuts the hyperinflation warning. It is wrong, I believe, to think that citing history absolves it of explaining how it arrived at the number it wants to replace that warning with.
The facts APNU cites check out. Guyana’s parliamentary record confirms that public servants received a 31.06 per cent salary increase in 1999 and a 26.66 per cent increase in 2000, awarded through the Armstrong Arbitration Tribunal following a prolonged strike. Compounded, that is a rise of close to two-thirds in two years, in an economy with no oil revenue to cushion it.
Inflation did not spiral in response; it eased in the years that followed. On the narrow point of whether large wage adjustments automatically produce runaway prices, the evidence does not support the government’s framing, and APNU deserves credit for making that argument with real numbers rather than slogans.
My difficulty is with what the statement does next. Having spent several paragraphs building an evidence-based case, APNU ends with a single unsupported line: that the minimum public-service wage should be G$200,000 a month. No fiscal modelling accompanies it. No reference is made to current public expenditure, to productivity, or to what the Treasury can sustainably absorb alongside existing commitments.
Most tellingly, no reference is made to the unions whose members this figure would actually govern — not the Guyana Public Service Union, not the the Guyana Teachers Union, not any of the bodies that exist specifically to negotiate wages on behalf of nurses, teachers and the wider public service.
That silence is not a minor drafting oversight. It goes to the heart of what has, for years, been the substance of the complaint against the People’s Progressive Party/Civic’s (PPP/C ) approach to public-sector pay. The criticism levelled at successive government wage announcements has rarely been that increases were too generous or too stingy in isolation; it has been that they arrived as decisions handed down, typically timed to elections or budget cycles, with little visible negotiation and no published rationale for why a particular percentage was chosen over another. Workers have often learned the size of their increase from a podium rather than a bargaining table.
If that is the objection — and I think it is a fair one — then a rival political party proposing its own wage figure through an identical mechanism does not answer the objection. It repeats it with a larger number attached. Setting a wage floor by press statement, however well-intentioned, is not meaningfully different in process from setting one by budget announcement. Both bypass the institution that is supposed to mediate between the state as employer and the workforce as represented labour. A coalition seeking to distinguish itself from the government’s record on this specific point needs to show its working, not simply outbid it.
There is a practical dimension to this too, separate from principle. A minimum wage figure produced through genuine negotiation with unions would carry information that a unilaterally announced figure cannot: an assessment, from the people who represent the affected workers, of what is fair given current living costs, and an implicit commitment from government or opposition to defend that figure once in office, having already tested it against the union’s own expectations.
A number produced without that process is politically costless to announce and correspondingly harder to guarantee once the arithmetic of governing actually has to be done. Guyana has watched wage pledges made during election campaigns prove difficult to fully honour before; a minimum-wage figure with no visible negotiating trail behind it risks joining that list, whichever party is making the promise.
None of this is an argument against a higher minimum wage. Guyana is, as APNU rightly notes, now an oil-producing economy with substantially greater fiscal capacity than it had in 1999, and there is a serious, legitimate conversation to be had about what that capacity should mean for the people who keep hospitals, schools and government offices running. But that conversation is better had, and better won, through the institutions built for it.
If APNU wants to demonstrate that its approach to public-sector pay is genuinely different from the government’s, the next step is straightforward: publish the basis for G$200,000, and say clearly whether the unions have been, or will be, consulted before that figure is defended as policy rather than offered as a press release.
Until a number like that has been through that process, it remains a pledge rather than a plan — and pledges, however large, are not what public servants ultimately get paid. Public servants want plans, not random pledges.
In other words, the lawlessness that the APNU accuses the government of perpetuating is not mitigated by the opposition by them proposing a higher number; it is compounded by it.
Nowhere in the statement by the second largest parliamentary opposition force is consultation mentioned; nowhere is collective bargaining mentioned, nowhere is the historical or contemporary roles of the unions considered, nowhere do we see a difference in the process of negotiation. In fact, we see just just a higher arbitrary number being proposed to be imposed. So, where is the difference between the alleged heavy hand of the current arrangement and the arbitrary number of the Opposition? Where is the place of collective bargaining to be placed? That is the question.
Mark DaCosta
