MASSES IN ACTION
The British Guiana Labour Union
The B.G.L.U. celebrates its anniversary on the 11th January, but the organization which was in existence on the 11th January, 1919, seems to have been no more than a “Porters Union”, an unofficial entity called into being by the waterfront strike. It was on April 6th that a meeting was held at the Unique Friendly Society in Regent Street at which Critchlow proposed a resolution for the establishment of a labour union, and this was carried. Two representatives of Bookers were also invited, and from them, came the suggestion for the formation of an Industrial Council for settling disputes between the dockers and the Water Street employers. The three-man Council met shortly afterwards, and recommended the eight-hour day and certain wage increases.
Out of the agitation of the dockers arose an organization which transcended their own struggle. As one correspondent of the Argosy pointed out, the tense post-war labour situation in the world at large which was regularly treated in the Guyanese press could not help but influence the Guyanese proletariat. It was a testimony to the revolutionary mood of labour throughout the land that requests started pouring in for membership of the B.G.L.U. from various parts of the country.
In April, a meeting was held at Victoria (East Coast Demerara) which decided in favour of a labour union branch for the area. The following month the workers of Bagotville (West Coast Demerara) followed suit; and these were typical examples of the movement which led to the rapid establishment of a countrywide workers’ organisation. All sections of labour were involved, including tradesmen. The first President, M. Hosanah, was a tailor; and there were even jibes that residents of the Alms House or Old People’s Home were allowed to join the Union. This came about because the Union was also a Friendly and Burial Society, thus grafting itself on to one of the oldest forms of social organisation which the masses of Guyana had experienced.
The B.G.L.U. had a wide base of direct industrial action. The latter portion of 1919 and most of 1920 witnessed a succession of disputes and strikes, involving, among others, the Railways, the Electric Company, the Sawmills, Sugar Estates, the Argosy and the docks. The pressure of this agitation, carried on by manual workers, was sufficent to gain advantages even for the Water Street clerks, though it was not surprising that these white-collar workers never showed real loyalty to the workers’ movement.
The first annual general meeting in 1920 was something of a fiasco, and the Union nearly disintegrated. Membership fell from a peak of 13,000 to a few hundred, but the Union continued to function as a pressure group. By 1923, the delegates to the general conference could look back on a few years of solid achievement. One Union campaign had led to the passage early in 1922 of a Rent Restriction Bill. There was a rumour in January 1923 that the Rent Act was about to be repealed, and the workers prepared to resume the fight if necessary. This was one of several ways in which the workers indicated that they would use the union to undertake tasks other than wage negotiations.
One resolution of the 1923 conference aimed at the establishment of a voluntary organization to provide advice which would prevent the masses from indulging in petty litigation in cases which could be settled out of court. Another principal concern was with unemployment, against which a petition was organized. Perhaps the most ambitious of the moves taken by the B.G.L.U. was its attempt to convene the first ever West Indian Conference in 1920. Unfortunately, only the Trinidad Working Men’s Association was able to send delegates – the remaining territories expressing willingness but inability to attend. The chance to develop a common West Indian perspective for the labour movement was therefore lost, though workers’ struggles in Trinidad were closely watched in Guyana.
Rural Revolution
It is necessary to stress that the awakening among the Guyanese masses was countrywide, and not simply confined to the activities of the urban workers of Georgetown. The B.G.L.U. took an interest in plantation labourers also, though its activities on the plantations were severely limited by the managers’ opposition to their labourers joining the Union. East Indian labourers for the most part continued to use Crosby and the Immigration Department to voice their problems, asking prominent Indian lawyers to intercede on their behalf. This was by no means a passive arrangement. Both the Crosby and the Indian lawyers had to meet huge deputations who arrived in Georgetown from the particular plantation or area, where the grievances were felt.
Often the whole plantation staff left en masse as happened in 1917 and again in 1924 with labour from Ruimvcldt. On the latter occasion, there was an encouraging unity between rural and urban effort. 4,000 Indians and Negroes started to march on Georgetown with flags, sticks and their tools—some to meet Critchlow at the B.G.L.U. office and others to the Immigration Department to complain about irregular wages.
Apart from the formation of the Labour Union, the initiative on the issues concerning the well-being of the masses came from the rural peasantry. The Chairman of the Victoria Institute remarked in April 1919 that “Georgetown looks to the East Coast to decide its political matters”, and the facts did bear out this situation. The weapons which the rural proletariat and peasantry fashioned for their struggle included credit banks and agricultural societies, while the Village Councils and the Village Chairmen’s Conferences were forums for the expression of the will of the rural masses and their determination to confront the planter class. In February 1919. the Attorney General accused A. A. Thorne, the workers’ representative in the Combined Court, of wanting to see a set of Bolsheviks in some village led by the Village Chairman. In reply, the Chairman of the West Bank Agricultural Society noted that “the Attorney General had brought in the ominous Russian term….The question was one of capital and labour. Labour was represented by the Farmers’ Conference and the Village Chairman’s Conference.”
Cane Farming
One of the most significant trends during the war era was the development of a system of cane growing on a peasant farming basis. In 1897, a Royal Commission had recommended grants-in-aid to cane farmers. Very little was done by the government to implement the report, but farmers and sugar planters worked out private arrangements on some estates. The farmers faced considerable difficulties, such as the transportation of their cane to the factories and its unloading, but they organized themselves to overcome these problems and to win higher rewards from the sugar estates which purchased their product. In March 1919, the Cane Farming Movement proposed legislation to regularize the relationship between the small cane farmer and the estate which bought and milled his cane. They pointed to Trinidad where there was a small amount of legislation passed on this subject in 1902, though what the Guyanese farmers would have preferred was an extensive code such as that which was in existence in Queensland, Australia.
