The Dues of Democracy

 

GBJ Commentary · Labour & the Rule of Law

The Dues of Democracy

What the State Owes Guyana’s Teachers

Two courts have spoken; the dues are still not remitted. What began as a labour dispute has become a test of whether judicial decisions bind the state when they are inconvenient to it — and of what the oil era will make of countervailing power.

By Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman · August 2026

One of the most consequential constitutional disputes of Guyana’s oil era turns on seven hundred Guyana dollars. That is the sum deducted each month from the salary of a unionised teacher and remitted to the Guyana Teachers’ Union — roughly $3.1 million monthly, some $37 million a year. In a national budget now measured in the trillions, in an economy widely described as the world’s fastest-growing in recent years, this is not a fiscal question. It never was. It is a question of power, and of whether the state will submit itself to the law it asks every citizen — every teacher, every child in every classroom — to obey.

The broad chronology is not seriously contested. In early 2024, after years of failed engagement over salaries and conditions, the Guyana Teachers’ Union gave formal notice of industrial action and its members withdrew their labour for some seventy-five days. It was, as the High Court later held, a lawful strike, undertaken after the collective bargaining process had been hollowed out by unilateral imposition. The government’s response was not to return to the table with greater seriousness. Instead, it announced that it would no longer deduct and remit union dues from teachers’ salaries — severing, in apparent retaliation, an administrative arrangement that had stood for decades.

The Union went to court. In February 2024, Justice Sandil Kissoon granted a conservatory order preserving the status quo. In April 2024, after full argument, the High Court delivered its judgment: the strike was justified; striking teachers could not be docked their pay for exercising a freedom the Constitution guarantees; and the decision to terminate the deduction and remittance of dues was arbitrary, discriminatory, and a violation of Article 149D of the Constitution.

The state appealed. It sought a stay of the order and was refused — the Court of Appeal finding that the balance of justice lay with the Union, and leaving the High Court’s order in full force. The Union’s chronology records that when the substantive appeal was ultimately determined, the appellate court upheld what the High Court had found. And whatever the precise disposition of that appeal, this much is beyond dispute: at no point since April 2024 — not for a single day — has any court suspended the order to deduct and remit.

Two courts have spoken, and neither has given the state relief. And still, as the Union’s General Secretary set out in a chronology dated August 7, 2026, the dues are not being remitted — a refusal so sustained that by August 2025 the Union was driven to file contempt proceedings against its members’ own employer.

I. When the State Loses in Court and Declines to Comply

Let us name what this is, because our public conversation has a habit of softening it. A government that continues a course of conduct after the High Court has declared it unconstitutional, and after the Court of Appeal has declined to grant it even temporary relief from the order, is not “reviewing its options” or “considering the judgment.” It is defying the courts. It is asserting, in conduct if not in words, that judicial orders bind the citizen but merely advise the state.

The government, to be fair, has not been silent; it has offered arguments, and they deserve to be named so they can be weighed. The Attorney General has contended that the deduction of dues was always a gratuitous, voluntary service — resting on the late Chief Justice Ian Chang’s ruling in Guyana Public Service Union v Nanda Gopaul that the state acted merely as the union’s agent — and therefore that its withdrawal was an executive decision beyond the reach of judicial review. The Chief Education Officer has added that the Union failed for decades to file its accounts with the Auditor General and the Registrar of Trade Unions, and that good governance compelled a review of the arrangement. These are not frivolous points, and a union that seeks the moral high ground on compliance should itself be scrupulously compliant with its statutory filing obligations.

Yet as a defence of the government’s conduct, the argument collapses on three grounds. First, the courts have already heard it — fully, with evidence, at two levels — and rejected it. The High Court found the termination arbitrary and discriminatory, noting that the state’s own letter invoked the political role of the Union’s leadership in the strike, which is retaliation, not audit enforcement. Second, the timing betrays the motive: a genuine accountability concern dating to 1989 does not suddenly ripen into action in the middle of a 2024 strike. If the Union’s filings were deficient for thirty-five years, the law provides lawful instruments for compelling them — none of which is the unilateral strangulation of the Union’s income. And third, even if the original arrangement were gratuitous, the question was overtaken the moment the High Court ordered its continuation and the Court of Appeal declined to disturb that order. A state may argue any theory it likes before judgment; after judgment, its choices narrow to two — comply, or pursue further appeal to the Caribbean Court of Justice. It has done neither.

“Defiance is not a third option known to law.” — T.R.B.

This should alarm every Guyanese, whatever they think of the GTU, of teacher strikes, or of the government of the day. Every constitutional democracy eventually reaches a moment when the government loses in court. That moment is not a failure of constitutional government; it is its ordinary operation. The true test comes afterwards: does the executive obey a judgment it dislikes? If it does, the rule of law grows stronger. If it does not, every constitutional guarantee becomes contingent on executive preference. The willingness of the executive to comply with adverse rulings is the load-bearing wall of constitutional government. Remove it, and every other right — property, contract, speech, the franchise itself — rests on nothing firmer than official goodwill. Investors understand this instinctively; it is why “sanctity of contract” and “rule of law” appear in every prospectus written about this country.

“What the government models in its treatment of the teachers, it teaches the world about the reliability of the Guyanese state.” — T.R.B.

And there is a particular cruelty in the choice of target. The Guyana Teachers’ Union was established in 1884. It is among the oldest trade unions in the Caribbean, born in the immediate shadow of emancipation and indenture. Few democratic institutions in Guyana possess such continuity: the Union predates universal adult suffrage, independence, and the Republic itself. The check-off arrangement now discontinued was not a favour; it was the settled infrastructure of an industrial relationship, the ordinary machinery through which a mass-membership union of modest-income workers sustains itself. To sever it in the middle of a labour dispute — and the High Court found precisely this — was to reach past the negotiating table and cut off the Union’s oxygen.

II. The Agreement That Was Signed and Then Shelved

The dues question does not stand alone. In August 2024, the Union and the Ministry of Education signed a Collective Labour Agreement covering 2024 to 2026: salary increases of ten, eight, and nine percent across the three years, alongside commitments to structured engagement, including regular professional development meetings. The government publicised this agreement energetically. It was presented, correctly, as evidence that collective bargaining could work.

The Union now reports that the nine percent increase due to teachers in 2026 — the final year of the agreement — has not been paid, and that despite repeated written requests, the consultative meetings the agreement promises have never been convened. The Ministry, by the Union’s account, does not even answer the letters.

If this is so, then the pattern is complete and it is damning: the state defies court orders, refuses to honour the agreement it signed, and fails even to answer correspondence from the bargaining agent of more than ten thousand of its employees. Each refusal, taken alone, might be explained away. Together they describe a philosophy of governance in which the teacher — the person to whom we hand our children each morning, the person whose motto for one hundred and forty years has been We Mould the Nation — is owed neither money, nor dialogue, nor even a reply.

III. The Oil-Era Question Beneath the Labour Question

The Business Journal returns, again and again, to a single question: will Guyana’s extraordinary new wealth be governed by institutions, or will institutions be dissolved by the wealth? The teachers’ case is a clean test, precisely because the money at stake is so trivial to the state and so vital to the Union. A government that cannot bring itself to remit $37 million a year in workers’ own dues — money that belongs to the teachers, merely passing through the state’s hands — while spending billions on stadia and ceremony, has told us what it believes about countervailing power. It believes there should be less of it.

But no serious development strategy survives the demoralisation of its teaching force. Every plan the government has announced — the hubs, the diversification, the human capital transformation — runs through a classroom. It runs through the mathematics teacher in Berbice, the head teacher on the Essequibo Coast, the young graduate deciding whether to stay in the profession or leave for the private sector or the diaspora. We cannot ask teachers to build the citizens of an oil economy while showing them, in the state’s own conduct, that agreements are optional, courts are advisory, and their union may be starved at will.

IV. What Should Happen Now

The remedies here are unusually simple, which is itself an indictment. The government should restore the deduction and remittance of union dues forthwith, as the High Court directed and the Court of Appeal left undisturbed, and address the consequences of the period of non-compliance consistent with the courts’ orders. It should pay the nine percent increase owed under the agreement it signed and celebrated. It should convene the consultative and professional development meetings that same agreement requires. And it should answer the Union’s letters — because a Ministry of Education that will not correspond with the teachers’ union has abandoned the most basic courtesy of social dialogue.

None of this requires generosity. It requires only that the state do what it agreed to do and what the courts have ordered it to do. That is the minimum content of the rule of law — and it is also, not incidentally, the minimum condition for the industrial peace the education sector desperately needs as the 2024–2026 agreement expires and a new round of bargaining looms.

---

The teachers of Guyana have kept their side of a very old bargain. They have moulded the nation for one hundred and forty-two years, through colony, independence, austerity, and now abundance.

The question before us is whether the state, in its moment of greatest wealth, will honour its debts to them —
not the debts of sentiment, but the enforceable ones: a court order, a signed agreement, and the simple dignity of a reply.

---

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment. Sponsors support the Guyana Business Journal as a whole; they play no role in commissioning, reviewing, or approving its content, and the analysis and conclusions are solely the author’s.

Individual Supporters Courtney Noel | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone

🇬🇾 Please support the Guyana Business Journal & Magazine today