The Tribune

WE’VE seen round one of industrial action this week, involving workers at the airport. Are you ready for round two?

Teachers have given the government a seven-day ultimatum to sign off on a full industrial agreement. Or else? Well, Bahamas Union of Teachers president Belinda Wilson said there were several options at their disposal. Clearly, those options could include industrial action.

Mrs Wilson spelled out the reasons for the ultimatum, saying: “We’ve been at the bargaining table from the 25th of May, 2019, and as recently as this morning I would have communicated with the lead negotiator for the government giving them seven days for us to sign off on a full agreement.

“I believe that we have exhausted the time. We have exchanged counter proposals eight times. We have been in hundreds of hours of meetings, and we are now ready to sign off on a full proposal so that teachers can receive the much-needed salary increases (and) benefits that they are so worthy of.”

Ultimatums are a blunt tool to use – but equally if negotiations have been dragging on for more than three years, there must be deep frustration on the teachers’ part.

If such a lengthy, drawn-out negotiation sounds familiar, it’s because the teachers are far from alone in the matter.

Over at the airport, Deputy Prime Minister Chester Cooper was just last week touting the release of funds that would settle matters there, but now off it goes back to negotiation.

For the teachers, Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis had announced in the Budget this year salary increases planned for schools, including retention bonuses, only for it to have hit the problem that it hadn’t been agreed with the teachers yet.

And look at the nurses, who despite being on the frontline of the fight against the pandemic, have had their dispute drag on for more than three years. Despite there being an industrial agreement, it remains unsigned.

Last month, in this column, we wrote that from union to union, matters drag on for years and years, so long that half the issues are outdated by the time anything actually gets signed.

We called for a sea change so that issues did not have to be so drawn out. There seems little sign of that change right now, with action at the airport, protests from jitney drivers, and a looming threat of action from teachers.

Surely we can find a way to resolve these issues more swiftly.

A good start

It is still early in the recovery effort after the diesel spill in Exuma, but we must applaud the workers who have already cleaned up 20,000 gallons of fuel.

Dr Rihanna Neely-Murphy, director of environmental planning and protection, said yesterday: “We have removed approximately 20,000 gallons of fuel from the area and the booms remain intact to keep the fuel contained.

“There is visibly less fuel in the water. We expect that the majority of the remaining fuel should be removed from the site between this afternoon and tomorrow (Saturday) and then we will continue with the remediation activities.”

The cause of the incident is reportedly because of a “breach in the hose” that ran from the supply ship, though there do of course remain many questions and a need to examine how so much fuel was able to leak.

But credit where it was due. This was a disaster for the area, but as recovery efforts go, clean-up crews have made a good start.