Early Articles by Cheddi Jagan
Letter to the Editor of the Daily Chronicle
July 6, 1946
69 Main Street Georgetown
July 6, 1946
Editor
Daily Chronicle
Georgetown
Dear Sir;
The working class will greatly appreciate the fact that you “deplore the low state of living among estate workers”. I doubted very much, however, whether it will accept your very novel way of solving this problem. You are of the opinion that the estate labourer does not have a great desire of material wants and therefore works only two or three days per week. You would stimulate this desire by introducing in the country districts flashy shop windows with various types of consumer goods with the hope that the labourers will work more days and produce more sugar and therefore, more wealth for British Guiana.
Let us look at the facts. The majority of sugar estate workers earn between 48c to $1.00 per day. With this low earning power and the present high cost of imported consumer goods, the average worker will never have the buying power even though he worked 16 hours per day and 7 days per week. Telling him to think in terms of radios, motor cars, electric lights, decent houses is only a mockery. His buying power cannot even acquire adequate foods, clothing, pencil, slate and books for his large number of school age children. Can the buying power of domestic servants, Water Street clerks, shirt and tobacco factory workers, and bakery hands ever acquire for them all their necessary wants displayed in the Water Street shop windows? Are they not working 40 to 60 hours per week? Why is it said that many Water Street clerks are living above their means and at the mercy of money lenders? In all these cases it is the same answer: small wages – no buying power.
Internationally, under the capitalistic mode of production and distribution, it is the same lack of buying power which intermittently produces a condition of so called “over production” and resultant depression and chaos.
The present relationship of wages, profits and obsolete method of production will never be able to satisfy the minimal moral wants of the estate labourer. Increased production will not be brought about under the existing wage-slave labour conditions. As long as the labour force is cheaper than modern machinery, our obsolete capitalists will continue to use it, and the conditions of the worker will remain the same. Only the socialized control of the sugar industry – maximum production with the use of the most modern machinery and elimination of profits to absentee capitalists – will increase the standard of living of the sugar worker.
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2000
In Defence of the Working Class
By C.B.Jagan B.Sc., D.D.S
As a result of my letter appearing in the Daily Chronicle on Sunday July 7, 1946, R.B.H. in the Guiana Graphic of Sunday July 14 countered with an article “A Vote is like a Wage”. To have arrived at those opinions considering the views expressed in my letter, one gets the impression that R.B.H. is either completely devoid of all sense of logical reasoning, in which case he should not be allowed to abuse the freedom of the press, or that he has embarked on an early campaign of smear and slander.
I am being painted as a visionary who will bring the sun and the moon to the people. He would credit me with a campaign slogan, “A car under every house”. It may be useful information that the workers in the U.S.A. at the present time do not look upon the possession of a car as a luxury, but as a necessity. My point of argument was that the acquiring of material wants – cars, radios, houses, electricity, books, pencil, slates, etc. – varies in direct proportion with buying power, which in turn is dependent upon two factors, wages and cost of consumer goods. As long as there is maintained the present condition of high cost for consumer goods and low rates of wages for workers, the working class which includes the estate labourers will never have the buying power to purchase his normal wants of adequate food, clothing and shelter, no matter how lavishly these are displayed.
A careful analysis of the article reveals the sinister hand of reaction trying to divide the working class along racial lines. I am smeared as “a champion of a particular race in the colony.” To me the alignment is clear –exploiter versus exploited, capitalism and profits versus slavery and the misery of the working class. In this I can see no question of race. It is only to be hoped that the workers of British Guiana will recognize the fountainhead of this racial propaganda, and will realize their power in their votes and adopt as their slogan “workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Why mention the 3½ million dollars already paid this year as wages by the sugar industry, when no mention is made as to the number of workers and actual number of man hours involved? In other words, give us the figure for the miserable wage rate per hour or per day. Why tell us about aggregate wages, and not mention aggregate profits and the various paddings which in truth are profits but are accounted as cost of production. To state that 80% of the 8 million dollars deposited in the Post Office Savings Bank belongs to the East Indians is subtle propaganda showing that their earning power must be high. The fact is that saving is dependent not only on earning power, but also on other factors as thrift and self-sacrifice. Over what period and by how many and what class of depositors was this sum of saving accumulated? One again recognizes in this statement of savings the creative hand of racial antagonism and division, putting forth the case that “wealth is power”.
Fear of insecurity dominates the soul of the working class today. The sugar estate labourer is forever paralyzed with the fear that at any time his family and himself can be evicted from estate property and house. R.B.H. would further prostitute and heighten this fear by rearing the ugly head of unemployment. Mechanization of the sugar industry, he would like to have propagated, would mean mass unemployment. He does not tell us that modern methods of production will decrease the cost of production and therefore, increase the wages of labour, present profits remaining constant. Mechanization need not result in unemployment. The labour force now used can still be employed at prevailing wages but working less hours. He does not want us to know that even if by mismanagement mechanization of the sugar industry result in unemployment, that the unemployment working class would demand and organize for full employment as one of its foremost rights and the Government of British Guiana dare not refuse to find ways and means for employment. It behoves the working class to become alive to this subtle form of propaganda - the fear of insecurity - employed by the capitalist.
Mr. R.B.H. would have psychoanalyzed men who sprang from the masses and who now advocate the cause of the working class. These men do not resent their origin because they are not seeking admission into the fraternity of the “Leisure class”, the capitalistic “Robber Barons”. The fact is that they do not resent, therefore they do not forget. One forgets and represses into the subconscious only the things of which one is ashamed. This is the time not for forgetting, but for remembering the miserable lot of the ordinary exploited worker.
The time is now for the vanguard of the working class to assume leadership and usher in Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man”.
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2000
Wanted – A Minimum Wage Law
by CHEDDI B. JAGAN BSc. D.D.S
An Article in THE LABOUR ADVOCATE Georgetown Sunday June 30, 1946
The standard of living of the majority of the wages earners of British Guiana is miserably low as compared to most progressive countries.
The present condition of low wages and high cost of living is responsible for many of his ills. In the sugar estates, he lives for the most part in dungeons, ranges and barracks which keep out the light but let in the rain. Fear of insecurity that he and his family can anytime be kicked out of the rat trap always dominates his soul and has made of him a cowed and servile individual. It would be far better that his wages were increased to allow him to pay rent or own a house. In the city the very miserable pittances doled out to factory (shirts, tobacco, etc.) workers and domestic servants force them to live crowded in backyard rooms and hovels. Census returns will show that large numbers of ten and more persons are huddled in one room.
Body and soul of the wage-earner cannot be expected to kept together under the existing low wages of 4 ½ cts to 7 and 9c per hour. It is no wonder that he is always having some kind of fever, aches and pains. The famous estate hospital cure all - quinine, cough mixture and salts and all the quack patent medicines – if of any value whatsoever – will be of no use if he is not receiving adequate amounts of all the necessary food values. Why is the tuberculosis rate so high in this country, especially among the lowest paid workers? Incidentally, advanced cases of tuberculosis patients who may require lung surgery by rib resection etc, cannot receive this treatment here. If he cannot afford to spend an enormous sum to go to Jamaica, he is left to die. Our government prefers to spend more than $30,000 on free leave passage than to spend the same amount for medical experts.
The Heller Committee for Research on Social Economics at the University of California found that it required about $54,000 per week to provide for “ the standard; health, decency and moral well-being for a man, wife and two children”. Senator Claude Pepper introduced a resolution in the U. S. Congress to make 65c per hour the minimum wage, saying that any other figure would be “sub-standard”.
Anyone who is familiar with the United States will agree that the cost of living here is not very much lower. Why then the tremendous difference in wages? The majority of Guianese cannot help but live sub-standard. Workers and wage-earners unite! Make a concerted drive for a minimum wage law of at least 25c per hour. Write your Legislative Council representatives to introduce and support such a measure.
© Nadira Jagan-Brancier 2000
