The Tribune

By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

MINISTER of Labour Shane Gibson said yesterday the government will soon bring legislation to Parliament to stop employers making workers redundant without proper notification.

He made his remarks outside the House of Assembly yesterday, while scores of laid off workers from the Wyndham Nassau Resort protested in front of Parliament.

Last Friday, more than 100 Wyndham employees were terminated without notice. The workers claim they were called into a meeting with management and told 130 of them were to be made redundant.

Mr Gibson said while there is not much the government can do because he hotel did not break any laws, the government will bring legislation to Parliament to prevent “this sort of thing” from happening again.

“We intend to see how we can amend the labour law to prevent employers from taking advantage of their employees. It is unfortunate what happened at Wyndham particularly when you look at the kind of concessions Baha Mar was given and when you look at what their commitment was to the country, when you look at the limited amount of rooms that they have down there now and the fact that they are not able to keep them open and keep these people employed.

“I said before there are many individuals who are now questioning whether to not they can handle a larger resort if they are unable to handle this particular resort,” he said.

Mr Gibson said the union now has to take on the hotel but there is one slight problem – their industrial agreement is not registered.

“There is an industrial agreement in place which requires notice, the problem with the industrial agreement is it is not registered because the (Industrial) Tribunal refused to register the agreement,” he said.

“We have since amended the law when we came into office to allow for the registration of industrial agreements by the Registrar of Trade Unions rather than the Tribunal because we saw the problems.

“We saw where about maybe 70 to 80 per cent of the unions could not get their industrial agreements registered simply because the Tribunal, for various reasons, did not register them and so we have corrected that problem already.

“Just as we will correct the problem where in the future we will legislate it.

“As a matter of fact there is an ILO convention that speaks specifically to prior notice being given to employees and employees representatives whenever you intend to make employees redundant.”

As for the fired workers, Mr Gibson said the government “cannot give them false hope”.

He said: “I do not own Baha Mar, we can only do our jobs. Our job is to make sure we protect the workers through legislation and through any means possible legally.

“You do not want me to tell them something today to make them feel good and then can’t deliver on it? I don’t own Baha Mar.”