WE MUST PROMOTE SAFETY PROTOCOLS AND HARD WORK AS WE CELEBRATE MAY DAY
May Day is a day set aside to acknowledge the role of workers all over the world in fighting for their rights in critical periods of our history. During this period, we therefore solidarise with them for their blood and sweat that provides tonic and strength for national development.
Unfortunately, owing to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we couldn’t since last year share in that excitement that brings government, labour and the public together in stock-taking and forging partnerships for the future.
Regardless of that the usual advice is that leadership of the Trades Union Congress and other labour organisations still finds precious time encouraging one another to keep the struggle.
Particularly around this time when we have not seen the impact of the pandemic reduce any significantly because other nations along our belt are witnessing another wave, the message is still to tread cautiously while we work harder and harder in meeting individual, collective, organisational and national goals.
In the face of the pandemic, however, productivity has been encouraging by the records that we have come across, even though the desire is that t could have been better. Since the beginning of the year, we have been threatened by our weaknesses in rigidly observing the safety protocols and we paid a price for it, until we got our acts together and returned to compliance after we invited the security into the streets, churches, markets and beaches. That was when we began recovering lost grounds.
The situation was to improve dramatically when we rolled out a national vaccination programme that was largely successful.
That is not to say we should drop our guards. It means that we should do more to sustain our safety protocols compliance directives and thereby improve productivity. That, we believe, is the message that we should be sharing with all workers and labour leadership in Ghana.
To improve our lives and livelihoods, we need to stay healthy and to stay healthy and strong, we need to continue steadfastly maintaining the protocols. While we commend workers and the leadership of labour in this country, we also remind them to continue their roles as civil society actors, particularly in the light of the raging conversation on galamsey and the Agyapa Deal that intends holistically to positively generating wealth from those resources for our collective benefit.
As partners in the formalisation agenda, we trust they have the capacity to help guide us out of our collective woes and the raging hijack that had forced the military to intervene in galamsey communities in fighting the scourge.
