The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Government is still awaiting recommendations from its newly-formed Tripartite Council on proposed amendments to the redundancy laws, the Minister of Labour yesterday indicating that this had been given added urgency by Scotiabank’s downsizing.

Addressing the bank’s branch consolidation and lay-offs, Shane Gibson said: “It just helps us to understand more why we have to look at revising our laws in the Bahamas to make sure that, if employers are now looking more and more at making employees redundant in this fashion, then we have to make sure that employees - after putting in many years into these establishments - will be properly compensated. We are satisfied that they are compensating them, but then it is all relative.”

Mr Gibson added: “The way the law is now, it speaks to how much you are compensated. All I am saying is this that this seems to be more of the fashion these days, where employers seem to have an easy time even though they say it is difficult for them.

“They seem to have an easy time making employees redundant. I think all of them are now being driven not by what service they could provide to the community, but they are being driven by their bottom line; how much  profit that they are making.

“In some instances it is not necessarily the profits they are making, but the profits that they anticipate making, and the fact thy cannot make what they anticipated making, they decide to cut back in advance,” the Minister added.

“For whatever reason I don’t think they are driven by trying to provide a service to the public, but they are driven by their profits, and so we have to take these things into consideration when we sit around the table with them and frame legislation to protect the consumer and to protect the worker.”

The trade unions have already called for reforms to statute law dealing with redundancy pay to aid long-serving workers who had remained with the same company for decades.

They said the limits set by the Employment Act meant that a redundant worker employed for 35 years was only entitled to the same pay-off as a colleague hired for 12 years.

The Employment Act currently sets a 12-year limit, or ‘cap’, on the redundancy pay an employee is entitled to under statute law.

Managerial staff receive one month’s salary for every year worked up to 12 years, giving them a maximum 13 months, once the one-month notice or payment in lieu of notice is accounted for.

Line staff can receive a maximum six months’ pay under the Employment Act if they have been with the same company for 12 years or more, plus another two weeks of ‘notice pay’.

However, several attorneys have been successful in winning greater compensation for longer-serving employees by initiating common law actions.

The Bahamian courts have upheld that workers who have served a company for longer than 12 years can sue for greater, and better, benefits under common law.

They ruled that the Employment Act was intended by Parliament to set a minimum, or ‘floor’, rather than cap the amount of compensation redundant employees are entitled to. But not all workers can afford an attorney.

Mr Gibson, meanwhile, said the Government was still awaiting recommendations from the Tripartite Council on several labour issues such as minimum wage and redundancy laws.

“We have passed and signed into law the Tripartite Council Bill. That council is supposed to be making recommendations to Government on labour-related issues,” Mr Gibson said.

“I’m still waiting on the recommendation on the minimum wage, and I’m still waiting on recommendations  on improving the redundancy laws and industrial injury matters, persons who get hurt on the job through no fault of their own and the limited amount of compensation they receive.

“Those are some issues I have difficulty with personally. Hopefully, the  Tripartite will conclude their recommendations on these and present it to us so that we can move forward in amending the necessary legislation.”

The National Tripartite Council Bill was passed in Parliament last year to establish a council comprising the Government, employers and workers.

The council is made up of two representatives from the National Congress of Trade Unions and one from the Trade Union Congress, three representatives from the Employer’s Confederation in the Chamber of Commerce, and three representatives from the Government.