Dear Editor,
Former President Donald Ramotar’s recent conversation on TedxTurkeyen was not merely disappointing; it was dangerous in the way propaganda becomes dangerous — wrapped in selective history, repeated distortions, and calculated attempts to reshape public memory.
What Guyanese heard was not an honest engagement with the history of labour or democracy. It was political revisionism, where repetition is mistaken for truth and distortion presented as fact.
History teaches societies to be wary of those who believe that if a lie is repeated often enough it eventually becomes accepted as reality. One of the most frightening aspects of propaganda is not simply dishonesty, but the deliberate manipulation of emotion, grievance, fear, and identity in order to condition citizens into abandoning reason and critical thought.
That is why this society must treat Ramotar’s comments seriously.
Young people especially must become discerning. Question everything. Examine history for yourselves. Do not allow political personalities to hand you convenient narratives while erasing facts that are inconvenient to their agenda.
Labour has permanent interests, not permanent friendships.
The trade union movement has always defended workers based on principles, rights, justice, and the rule of law, regardless of which party occupies political office. That is why attempts by Donald Ramotar to reduce labour’s history to some colonial conspiracy are deceptive and historically dishonest.
Let this nation remember that the trade union movement began advocating for one man, one vote and internal self-government as early as 1926 — almost a quarter century before the first mass-based political party, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), was formed in 1950.
Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow himself was among the founding members of the PPP. That fact alone destroys the deceptive narrative that trade unionism in Guyana was somehow divorced from politics. The labour movement was never apolitical because politics determines the social and economic conditions under which working people live.
In fact, the trade union movement laid much of the modern political foundation of Guyana through its struggles for representation, constitutional reform, workers’ rights, education, social justice, and self-government. Those are historical facts.
Long before the emergence of modern party politics, organised labour was already mobilising workers against exploitation and colonial domination. There was never a “lull” in trade unionism after Critchlow founded the movement in 1905. From its inception, labour fought relentlessly against economic exploitation, social injustice, and political exclusion under colonial rule.
Workers endured poor wages, harsh conditions, and systemic inequality so severe that Britain eventually established the Moyne Commission in the 1930s to investigate workers agitation across the Caribbean.
The struggle of labour was always economic, social, and political because the life of the worker does not stop at the field, office or factory gate.
Some home truths also need to be told.
Cheddi Jagan himself entered local politics through the trade union movement after returning to Guyana — a movement built under the leadership and vision of Critchlow. Before that, Jagan’s earliest political exposure came in the United States while attending Howard University, the historically Black academic institution that shaped many intellectual and political movements across the diaspora.
And it is not lost on many that there continues to be a deliberate effort in this society to erase, minimise, or diminish the contributions of Black people to the development of Guyana — or to recognise their value only when they are being led by others, but not when they themselves occupied positions of leadership and influence.
That historical dishonesty must be challenged wherever it appears.
Ramotar conveniently ignores another critical historical truth. The tensions that emerged between sections of the labour movement and the PPP/Cheddi Jagan government in the 1950s did not arise out of racism. They arose out of competing political ideologies.
At the time, the PPP was increasingly seen through the lens of socialism and communism, while many labour leaders and workers believed Guyana’s future should be grounded in Western parliamentary democracy and capitalist economic structures. Those ideological differences created deep political tensions within the nationalist movement.
Unfortunately, those competing political interests later divided the society and sections of the labour movement along racial lines, even though the original dispute itself was fundamentally ideological and political in nature.
That history matters because too many people today attempt to reduce every disagreement in Guyana to race while ignoring the serious ideological struggles that shaped this nation.
Then came the 1960s.
The trade union movement again clashed with the Jagan government over major national issues, particularly the Labour Relations Bill and the Kaldor Budget. Those disputes contributed to the 80-day strike in 1963, one of the most significant periods of industrial unrest in Guyana’s history. Workers demanded better wages, fairer treatment, and improved conditions, but were met with hostility by the Jagan government during the infamous “not a cent more” period.
So, for Ramotar now to suggest that the trade union movement was merely a British or CIA tool deployed against the PPP is not only false, it insults generations of trade unionists who sacrificed for workers’ rights long before and long after Independence.
Now to the present day.
What makes Donald Ramotar’s statements even more disturbing is that he knows better. He did not stand outside the labour movement looking in. He participated at the leadership level through the original Federation of Independent Trade Union of Guyana (FITUG) and helped shape some of the very rules governing the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) today.
So, one is forced to ask: are those rules democratic only when the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) controls the outcome? Is democracy legitimate only when it serves one political interest? Are institutions independent only when they submit to party control?
The nation must also be reminded that the only union in Guyana constitutionally aligned to a political party is the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU), which is aligned to the PPP. Every other union has no such control.
Yet whenever independent institutions refuse political capture or refuse to bow to PPP control, they are attacked, delegitimised, vilified, and branded enemies of democracy. That pattern is now unmistakable.
And this is where the nation must become vigilant, because propaganda succeeds when citizens stop questioning authority, stop examining evidence, and begin surrendering facts to emotion and political loyalty.
Donald Ramotar must also answer for his own stewardship.
It was under the administration of Bharrat Jagdeo — when Ramotar served as the PPP’s General Secretary — that State subventions to the GTUC and Critchlow Labour College (CLC) were withdrawn in a naked act of political hostility toward organised labour. Those anti-labour posture continued under Ramotar’s own presidency between 2011 and 2015, where there was open refusal to meaningfully engage the GTUC in national policymaking in the manner previous administrations had done.
There was a reprieve from that anti-labour hostility under the David Granger/Moses Nagamootoo administration between 2015 and 2020, when organised labour was once again recognised as a legitimate national stakeholder and some level of engagement with the GTUC resumed.
Today, however, Guyana finds itself back under an increasingly anti-labour posture under the administration of Irfaan Ali, where independent trade union voices are again viewed with suspicion whenever they refuse political alignment or dare to challenge government policy. The subventions were also taken away when Ali assumed office in 2020.
Under Forbes Burnham, Desmond Hoyte, and even Cheddi Jagan (1992-1997), despite disagreements with labour, there remained recognition that organised labour was a legitimate stakeholder in national development. The subventions which started under Burnham were kept in tack. Engagements with GTUC and those governments contributed to advances in minimum wage protections, housing, healthcare, transportation, public health, education, and institutions like Critchlow Labour College, which opened doors of advancement and higher education to working-class citizens.
Even amidst political disagreements, Labour Day (May Day) activities received State support because governments understood that workers mattered and that labour had earned its place in national life.
Contrast that with the present political theatrics where workers are reduced to props for breakfast photo opportunities while their real concerns — wages, cost-of-living, job security, dignity, and justice — remain unresolved.
Workers are not begging for one meal.
Workers are demanding fairness, respect, opportunity, and a better standard of living.
The trade union movement has always understood that workers’ rights inside the workplace cannot be separated from conditions outside it. That is why labour fought for education reform, healthcare, tenant protections, constitutional advancement, and broader social justice long before many of today’s political actors arrived on the scene.
Modern Guyana rests heavily on foundations laid by labour. There are those today who would prefer younger generations never fully understand that truth because an informed society is harder to manipulate.
Donald Ramotar must also understand this clearly – labour’s history, sacrifices, and contributions to this nation will not be rewritten, distorted, or politically sanitised without challenge.
The greatest threat to any democracy is not disagreement. It is the normalisation of dishonesty. And when influential figures repeatedly distort history while demanding unquestioning acceptance, societies must pay attention — because that road has never ended well anywhere in the world.