The Tribune

By DANA SMITH

Tribune Staff Reporter

dsmith@tribunemedia.net

LABOUR Minister Shane Gibson said ongoing negotiations concerning City Market, Customs and Immigration are all going well.

Former employees of the failed supermarket, City Market, have been demanding a collective $3m severance package and questioning the status of their multi-million dollar pension fund since the chain folded last April.

Prime Minister Perry Christie had announced earlier the government has had meetings with Trans-Island Traders head Mark Finlayson – the boss of City Market – about the former employee’s concerns. Mr Gibson said yesterday those talks “look very promising” and are going better than they were earlier.

“I don’t want to give the details but we are working on both ends,” he said. “We’re working on the ends of those who are entitled to redundancy payment and it looks very promising. Much more promising now than it looked a month ago.”

The government is also looking to aid former employees who are in the pension plan, he said, “and so on both ends it is looking very, very good”.

As for Customs and Immigration, Mr Gibson said, talks with the union are also going well and both parties are working on “non-financial issues”. Customs and Immigration staff have long-standing issues with their shift system, medical coverage, salaries and insurance. In April, workers staged a two-week strike at eight location.

The strike ended when former Labour Minister Dion Foulkes referred their trade dispute to the Industrial Tribunal and told the officers they had 24 hours to return to work.

Mr Gibson said, yesterday: “So far, the negotiations have been going pretty good. I think they met twice already and so obviously it’s going to be a tough set of negotiations.

One of the things that we did, we wanted to give them a very comprehensive document covering all of the points that they had in their proposal.

“Unfortunately, we were unable to complete it because they decided that they wanted to start negotiations now.

“Their lawyers wrote us and asked us to begin to submit the non-financial items, initially, and that we should begin the process of negotiating those non-financial items and hopefully by the time we get to the financial items, then we will have a proposal for them.”

Prime Minister Christie is “committed” to working with the officers and was “very sympathetic” to their concerns, Mr Gibson said.