EDITORIAL: The pains of labour

The economic impact of the ongoing pandemic has been nothing short of the nightmare it was reasonably foreseen to be, especially in those countries whose economies are based primarily on providing services to others that depend on human interaction and international travel, both phenomena that are significantly restricted by the current plague. Tourism is clearly one such service and, unfortunately for us at this time, it happens also to be the linchpin of our economy.

In consequence therefore, the local economy has all but crashed, replete with insolvencies and closures of many of the establishments that were constructed to provide these services exclusively. Of course, these circumstances prove to be directly catastrophic for the owners, investors and workers in those businesses, but also indirectly for the nation that is forced to confront unprecedented job losses, a regrettable inability to satisfy redundancy payments for workers by employers and, naturally, the social fallout that will inevitably result.

Our immediate sympathies are with the workers who appear to have been the ones identified to bear the brunt of the downturn.

Hence, almost daily, there are news reports of protesting workers drawing public attention to their plight of having not timeously received their statutory just deserts although these had been solemnly promised by their employers in some cases. Last week, the list of hotels whose staff protested the non-payment of their due severance or holiday pay read like a travel brochure of accommodations for a luxury holiday.

We have been informed that in at least one case, the governing administration is prepared to use the resources of the National Insurance Scheme to underwrite the outstanding sums, although, according to one opinion, this is akin to, in the local vernacular, throwing money in Maxwell Pond, since it will be incapable of recovery in the existing circumstances. Our uninitiated opinion is that the state should seek an undertaking from the establishment so as to establish its entitlement in restitution.

There was more bad news last week for labour when the chairman of the Employment Rights Tribunal bemoaned the absence of facilities, both physical and clerical, to permit the tribunal to implement its mission effectively.

Nor has the situation been assisted by a scarcely covert conflict of legal opinion between the governing administration and the leader of one workers’ organization as to whether a recent amendment to the redundancy legislation is or is not the impetus for the current contretemps.

We are not sufficiently briefed to offer a considered opinion on this matter but, given that there was a variation of the former legal position and that this change unarguably reduced the existing rights of the worker, we would not be surprised at the likelihood of any relation, however indirect, between the amendment and the ongoing protests.

It may be purely coincidental but the fact that labour should be the sector that appears to be suffering most in these times after over half a century of governance by two political organizations that style themselves as “labour parties approaches the height of dark irony.

In some jurisdictions, special priority is given to the payment of the termination payments of employees on the winding up of a company. There is no such legislation here…not even the obligation for employers to keep a reserve fund for such liabilities.