Laurier study finds concerning labour conditions for sugarcane workers in Guyana

July 13, 2026

By Rita Persaud, Assistant Professor, Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management

When occupational health and safety systems fail, the consequences are most often counted in physical injuries and lost working days. Our new international study asks a different question: what do those failures do to the psychological health and well-being of the workers who must live within them?

The study, “‘It Ain’t Just the Body That Suffering, Is the Mind Too': Occupational Health Governance and Psychological Well-being Among Sugarcane Workers in Guyana,” was published in Culture and Psychology. Our research brings together an international team of scholars, including Tejroi Naipaul and Jimmy Naipaul at the International Executive School in Strasbourg, France, and Khagendra Nath Gangai at Sharda University in Greater Noida, India.

Guyana is among the fastest-growing economies in the world, elevated to World Bank high-income status since oil revenues began transforming the country’s fortunes in 2022.

For workers in its sugarcane industry, that transformation has not arrived. They continue to labour under occupational health and safety frameworks our research found to be formally present but experientially absent. In other words, governance systems exist on paper but play no meaningful role in the daily working lives of the people they are designed to protect.

Our study draws on interviews with sugarcane workers across Guyana’s active estates and identifies four interconnected themes:

1. Workers described employer accountability as effectively absent, with safety concerns routinely dismissed and incidents left uninvestigated.
2. Protective equipment and training were experienced as woefully inadequate. Though unacceptable, it became normalized as an unremarkable feature of working life.
3. The possibility of raising concerns had become institutionally blocked, with silence understood across the workforce as the only rational response to conditions that punished those who spoke up.
4. Underlying all of this was a persistent psychological burden: anxiety, disrupted sleep and emotional strain that followed workers beyond the workplace and into their home lives, carried entirely without institutional recognition or support.

This research makes visible the distance between what occupational health governance looks like on paper and what workers actually live. The workers demonstrated a clear understanding of their circumstances and made deliberate choices in response to them. In this context, silence was not a sign of disengagement but a rational adaptation to structural realities. These findings highlight the need for occupational health and psychological well-being initiatives grounded in the cultural, social and economic contexts of workers’ lives. Such approaches are not supplementary; they are essential to effective occupational health governance.

Our findings carry implications that extend well beyond Guyana, speaking to any industry where the human cost of governance failure is measured not in incident reports, but in the silent and unacknowledged toll on those who show up to work every day.