The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

Bahamas Food Services’ US parent yesterday confirmed that the wholesale giant has been forced to permanently terminate staff due to the protracted nature of the tourism industry’s COVID-19 recovery.

Sysco, in response to Tribune Business inquiries, said the pandemic’s devastating impact on its core hotel and restaurant business - with most properties either closed or suffering from much-reduced business volumes - had left it with no choice but to align workforce costs with revenues.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a serious impact on the economy in The Bahamas. Many of our hotel and restaurant customers have closed due to the severe decline in tourism, resulting in a significant impact to our business,” Sysco said of its Bahamian subsidiary.

“Earlier this year, we furloughed associates in hopes of being able to recall them in the summer as the crisis subsided but, unfortunately, the economy is expected to take more time than previously anticipated to recover.

“As a result, we made the very difficult decision to permanently reduce the size of our workforce. We are constantly monitoring the economic environment, and are eager for tourism to rebound in The Bahamas so that we may be able to ultimately hire workers back.”

Sysco declined to detail how many persons have been terminated, but sources suggested up to 100 may have been impacted at the Gladstone Road-headquartered firm. Tribune Business understands that those impacted were largely workers who this newspaper reported in April had been temporarily furloughed when the COVID-19 crisis hit.

Wholesale industry sources said Sysco Bahamas Food Services had been especially vulnerable because a significant amount of its business is concentrated in the hotel and restaurant sector. “It’s like someone turned off a tap,” one contact said. “They’re not that strong on the retail side. It’s a dire situation, it really is.”

Tribune Business was tipped to the terminations on Tuesday afternoon by a source, speaking on condition of anonymity, who said they had been carried out over the last three weeks.

However, John Pinder, director of labour, told this newspaper he was unaware of any Sysco Bahamas Food Services terminations and understood that the company had merely placed staff on reduced work weeks.

“They have their employees on a short-term work week is what they said. They have not terminated anyone to-date; at least they have not said anything to me. This letter was sent to me on May 8 and it was going to come into effect on May 11,” Mr Pinder said.

“I heard they were going to terminate staff, but they have not said anything to me. Maybe they have said something to the minister (Dion Foulkes). What they would do is send the notification to the minister and carbon copy me, or the minister would send the copy to me, so I haven’t gotten a copy of anything from Sysco sent to me yet and I can only speak to what I have now.”

Mr Pinder added of the short work week: “That means you can only work for three days a week, or work for 16 hours out of the week. They said the schedule is supposed to be attached but they haven’t sent it to me. They may have sent it to the minister but he hasn’t carbon copied me. They were supposed to have a list of the workers who would be impacted attached but they have not sent it to me, or at least I don’t see it in the file.”