Dear Editor,
Let us dispense with diplomatic circumlocution. What occurred at the Ekaa Quarry isn’t a labour dispute. It is not a regulatory oversight. It is not an administrative gap awaiting correction. It is modern slavery — systematically practised, politically protected, and governmentally enabled by an administration that has demonstrated, with remarkable consistency, that workers’ rights are negotiable where powerful friends are involved.
38 Indian nationals — human beings who crossed an ocean in search of dignified employment — were found in conditions that shame every standard of civilised governance:
their passports seized, rendering them legally immobile and utterly vulnerable; detained at the whim of their employer for perceived infractions, without legal process or independent review; denied adequate food, water, and the elementary right to communicate with the outside world; housed in conditions so degrading they constitute a violation not merely of Guyanese labour law and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, but of basic human dignity; paid partially, arbitrarily, and at the discretion of the very man who held their documents and their freedom; and one worker is dead — dead — under circumstances that no competent government has yet moved urgently to investigate.
This is not an employer problem. This is a governance failure of the first order.
A Top Gun attends the commissioning of this very quarry, publicly and closely associated with the owner, who simultaneously owns Texila University — an institution that itself recruits from the same Indian subcontinent whose nationals now sit in Georgetown demanding only their passports, their wages, and a flight home. That proximity between Guyana’s #1 citizen and an employer impunity is not coincidental. It is the political economy of modern patronage operating in plain sight.
When a head-of-state graces an employer’s quarry’s commissioning ceremony, that employer acquires something more valuable than a photograph, he or she gets the reasonable expectation that the apparatus of State — the Labour Ministry, the police, regional officials — will not move against him or her with urgency. The 38 Indian nationals at Ekaa Quarry did not invent that expectation. They suffered its consequences.
The government’s silence in the face of these conditions is itself a political statement. Silence, in matters of this gravity, is never neutral. It is a choice which this government has chosen, repeatedly and conspicuously, to protect the comfort of its associates over the constitutional rights of workers on Guyanese soil.
Nor is the Government of India acquitted by this analysis. A sovereign state’s first obligation to its nationals abroad is protection — not phone calls to company officials. Not diplomatic pleasantries. Protection.
The Indian High Commission in Georgetown issued no emergency travel documents. It provided no financial assistance to workers rendered destitute by an employer who held their earnings hostage. It made no formal, public demand upon the Guyanese Minister of Labour. It promised, by all accounts, to make a few calls to company officials based in India — as though thirty-eight passport-less, underpaid, inadequately fed workers in a foreign jurisdiction constituted an inconvenience to be managed rather than a crisis to be resolved.
This is not diplomacy. It is sovereign abdication dressed up. India doesn’t run things in Guyana — that much is correct — but India most certainly runs things for its own nationals, and the failure to do so here is a compound disgrace: the employer brutalised them, the Guyanese government looked away, and the Indian government reached for a telephone.
The contrast with Jamaica’s response to its own migrant worker crisis in Ontario in 2022 and 2023 is instructive and, for Guyana’s government, deeply unflattering.
When Jamaican workers at Komienski Farms in Brantford, Ontario penned an open letter describing conditions that workers themselves equated to systematic slavery — bunkhouses infested with bedbugs, bathroom breaks denied as company policy, the ever-present threat of non-renewal for those who spoke out, the Jamaican Labour Minister did not make phone calls. He travelled personally to more than ten Ontario farms, beginning with Komienski Farms, and committed publicly to immediate resolution.
Those Jamaican workers described employers who thought of them, in their own words, as something close to slaves — the way they were spoken to, the way they were greeted, the daily grind of indignity that stopped just short of what a 32-year-old worker felt comfortable calling racism. They had left their children, their spouses, their parents, to come for something better. They were told it was company policy to hold their bladders in the field.
Jamaica’s government heard them. Jamaica’s government moved.
Guyana’s government attended the quarry’s commissioning ceremony.
This is not a new story. It is the oldest story in Guyanese political economy, wearing contemporary clothes.
When the plantation owners of the sugar estates received their East Indian contracted workers from the districts of Uttar Pradesh beginning in the 1840s, the architecture of control was identical in its essential features: documents managed by the employer, movement restricted, wages subject to deduction, accommodation provided as a mechanism of dependency rather than dignity, complaint suppressed by the ever-present threat of economic ruin. The indenture system was abolished because generations of workers and their advocates named it for what it was — not a labour arrangement, but a system designed to extract maximum value from human beings at minimum cost, underwritten by State power that chose production over people.
At Ekaa Quarry in 2025, the passports replaced the indenture papers. The quarry replaced the sugar estate. The politically connected owner replaced the colonial plantation manager. The Labour Ministry’s absence replaced the colonial magistrate’s indifference. The architecture is identical. Only the vocabulary has been modernised.
When do we get to say that Guyana is truly a land where fairness occurs for workers? Not while a government that champions oil revenues as national progress permits its associates to hold foreign workers’ passports, withhold their wages, deny them water, and return one of them home in a coffin under circumstances that remain uninvestigated.
The Opposition Leader’s intervention was the performance of the duty of care that the government itself abdicated. But opposition transport and a diplomatic meeting aren’t resolution. They are the emergency response to a failure that demands systematic remedy.
The unconditional return of all seized passports — today, not pending investigation. The full payment of all withheld wages and salaries, with interest, before a single worker boards a return flight. Airfare home, funded by the employer, as a condition of any settlement. An independent criminal investigation into the death of the worker who did not survive Ekaa Quarry, conducted without deference to the employer’s political connections. A formal parliamentary inquiry into the Labour Ministry’s failure to inspect, intervene, or act, and into the precise nature of the relationship between the President’s office and Sarju Bhaskar. Legislative reform establishing mandatory, unannounced inspection regimes for all worksites employing foreign nationals, with criminal penalties for passport seizure that are prosecuted, not merely threatened.
A government that can’t protect 38 workers from a bad employer who seizes documents, withhold wages, denies water, and to return one of them to India in a box, is not a government that has earned the right to speak about development, progress, or the transformation of Guyana’s oil wealth into national prosperity.
Prosperity built on the backs of workers whose passports are held hostage is not development. It is the indentureship system in a hard hat.
The workers of Ekaa Quarry asked for nothing extraordinary. They asked for what was already theirs: their documents, their wages, their dignity, and their right to go home.
Modern slavery does not announce itself with chains. It announces itself with a seized passport, a withheld salary, a dead worker, and a government that attends the commissioning ceremony.
The reckoning is coming. ‘Tis due.
Submitted with respect, in the interest of fairness to all workers — past, present, and those yet to arrive on Guyanese soil seeking nothing more than honest wages for honest work.