Workplace discrimination bill on the horizon

Legislation is coming to deal with the matter of discrimination in the workplace.

That’s the word from Minister of Labour and Social Partnership Relations Colin Jordan, who said that the Bill has already been approved by the Cabinet and it is expected that it will make its way to Parliament to be debated soon. He made the revelation yesterday morning as the second day of the debate on the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure resumed at the Worthing Corporate Centre, where Parliament is being temporarily held while environmental problems at the Parliament Buildings are being rectified.

Sitting in the Well of Parliament, flanked by senior officials from his ministry – Permanent Secretary Dr. Karen Best and Chief Labour Officer Claudette Hope-Greenidge, Minister Jordan said that workers are being discriminated against for a number of things and the proposed legislation is intended to prevent such from happening. He went further, indicating that the Prevention of Discrimination Bill will seek to prevent employers from using “frivolous reasons” for terminating employees or putting them at a disadvantage or refusing to even hire persons because of such things as ethnicity, class, gender and disability among other things.

“We have a responsibility really to safeguard the dignity of our people, we have a responsibility to make sure that there is inclusion, so that when an employer seeks to pick on a person because of their colour or shade, because we have some of that in Barbados as well...in certain jobs you had to look a certain way to get the job, employers would tell you this is a frontline job and I want a person who is not too this or is not too that. Those kinds of views have no place in a modern Barbados, in a developing Barbados, in a Barbados that is seeking to build its people and so we see ourselves as protecting the dignity of our people; we also see ourselves as facilitating the inclusion of everybody,” he said.

Minister Jordan said that every Barbadian and person residing in this country has the right to contribute to their own development and the development of the country and not to be discriminated against in those efforts.

“We believe the discrimination bill will start to create in the minds of employers that we are dealing with human being, we are dealing with people who have to be treated as human beings,” he stated.

He spoke to this just moments after indicating his ministry is cognisant that the power relationship in the workplace is not equal and that they have a responsibility to bring some equity to the matter. With that in mind, he appealed to all employers to treat their staff as people. He made the point while indicating that too many employers focus on labour and do not focus on people.

“It has to be understood they come to the workplace, not as machines with algorithms driving them, but as people who have woken up, some to a sick child, a nagging somebody, to all kinds of issues and illness and these are persons who are expected to perform. Now machines do not have to take those other things into consideration, human beings have to,” he maintained. (JRT)