Diamond Workers Picket Guysuco calling for Severance Pay

Almost all of the just over four hundred (400) workers attached to Diamond Estate today (March 30, 2010) staged a spirited picketing exercise in front of the Field Office of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco) at Diamond, East Bank Demerara protesting against Guysuco not wanting to award them their Severance Pay as they are no longer required to work permanently at Diamond. The picketing exercise will continue tomorrow. The Diamond cultivation which comprises some 6,000 acres is slated for closure. The Corporation’s Blueprint for Success, also described as the Turnaround Plan, released last April confirmed the cultivation’s closure. Since last year all categories of workers but the cane harvesters were instructed to take up work at the LBI and Enmore locations – miles away from their homes and their regular workplace. 

The Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) has contended that the decision to close the Diamond cultivation is injudicious. The Union pointed out that in keeping with the Corporation’s goal of ultimately producing 80,000 tonnes of packaged sugar at Enmore Estate, the maintenance of the Diamond cultivation would ensure an adequate cane supply and would save the Corporation millions of dollars, having to develop new lands on the East Coast of Demerara which certainly would not be as high yielding as the Diamond cultivation.

The Corporation, ignoring the Union, is advancing the closure process as it is merely reaping the existing canes and not doing an iota to facilitate new cane growth. The Union, in the circumstances, fully supports the workers in their bid to be paid their severance pay in keeping with the extant Collective Labour Agreement.

The deployment of the workers to the East Coast Demerara Estates will rob the workers of their pay off benefits noting that many of them will either immediately or gradually opt out of the employ of the Corporation once they are permanently deployed to the East Coast Estates. The Union aware that the struggle of the Diamond workers will require the solidarity of fellow workers across the industry as well as others will do everything to support the workers so that the insensitive Corporation does not deny them their rightful Severance Pay.