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Hotel heading for confrontation with BWU
2/10/2012
ONE major hotel in Barbados seems to be asking for a confrontation with the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU).
According to Senator Sir Roy Trotman, General Secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), one of the things that the BWU has been concerned with is saving jobs. In fact, he noted that the instruction from the organisation’s executive council has been to enter into collective agreements, where it will be able to exercise proper levels of flexibility to press for continued employment of workers. By and large, he said, the BWU has been continually receiving reasonable responses from employers, but there are a few who are being difficult.
“We have one particular hotel that is being particularly difficult at this time. We have sought to draw the attention to the employers of Barbados to that major hotel, which seems to be asking for a confrontation. We don’t want one, but they have gone out of their way to fire people and to challenge the level of agreements that we are arriving at in the hotel industry, when that hotel is the best able to meet any agreement which the hoteliers are offering,” Sir Roy commented while not naming the hotel in question.
“We think that it smacks of a deliberate wish to have a confrontation. We have told the Prime Minister and the Social Partners that we do not believe that a confrontation is what Barbados needs at this time. It needs employers and it needs workers’ representatives on both sides who will exercise the kind of deep thought and careful consideration of the needs of the other side, and that involves being able to establish a correct level of balance between what workers’ needs are in these trying times and what employers need to support them to get over the hump,” the BWU general secretary said.
Sir Roy suggested, however, that when the Employment Rights Bill is fully brought on stream, this may help to put an end to some of the difficulties surfacing as concerns for the BWU.
“We are pushing that head with some of our major planks for our development in 2012, but one or two employers are taking a position that is very contrary. And we think that the sooner the Government manages to debate the Employment Rights Bill, which is now laid in the House (of Assembly) and to proclaim the Act when it becomes an Act, the better it will be for many of us, because it seems to us that many employers are trying a last-ditch effort to exploit every ounce of slavery labour that they can from their employees, before the Bill manages to complete its cycle of debate and for passage through the House of Parliament,” Sir Roy concluded. (RSM)
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