The Tribune

THE settlement between the government and the Grand Lucayan’s managerial union is an unusual state of affairs.

The most unusual part of it is that the government had won a near-total victory in the courts over the Bahamas Hotel Managerial Association and its 36 members.

The Supreme Court had dismissed virtually all claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal and awarded legal costs to the Grand Lucayan to be paid by the union.

And now, we have the government doing a deal with the union to come to a settlement that seemingly it didn’t have to and for which it had the legal judgement to back it up.

While the details of the settlement haven’t been made public, The Tribune understands that TUC president Obie Ferguson had been seeking a sum of about $600,000 to settle the matter, representing termination and redundancy payments allegedly owed to the middle managers plus membership dues and agency shop fees due to the BHMA.

So despite a near total legal victory, is the Bahamian taxpayer on the hook now for hundreds of thousands dollars more?

The former chairman of the Grand Lucayan, Michael Scott, QC, wants to know exactly that. He called the settlement an “unconscionable waste of public money”, and said the terms needed to be publicly disclosed and not remain confidential as it appears has been agreed.

This is after all public money, so the public ought to see how it has been used.

He has raised other questions too, such as whether the unsuccessful PLP candidate for Central Grand Bahama, Senator Kirkland Russell, might have benefitted financially.

In simple terms, the public ought to know how much this is costing – how much people will receive, whether the government is paying the union costs and if so what those costs are, and so on.

An explanation of why there has been such a reversal ought to also be forthcoming – as well as the process of coming to that decision. Who made the decision, who offered advice and what was the reason for going from victory in the court to cutting a deal?

As Mr Scott says, “The public has a right to know the plain and unvarnished facts of this settlement. The public also has a right to know that the public interest will not be sacrificed on the basis of some expedient… for the so-called Memorandum of Understanding between the unions and the present government in consideration of which this appears to be some kind of payment.”

Questions have clearly been raised – how quickly will the government move to answer over the use of public money in this way?

Schools

The schools are back – and so are complaints from teachers.

Bahamas Union of Teachers president Belinda Wilson says thousands of teachers are at “breaking point” after seeing no movement on issues raised with officials since September.

Mrs Wilson said that she believes “a lot of the meetings are to say that we met with the union” and “not really to get true results”.

Mrs Wilson, who disputed the figure of 466 teachers that did not report to work this week and said more than 1,200 took some form of action, has catalogued a list of frustrations. She said there are probably “30 or 40 concerns”.

Clearly, some of those concerns are genuine – as can be seen by the serious issues affecting TA Thompson school, where the main education block was in such a state that students had to work from another block on campus, with only one working bathroom for 200 students. How do you ensure a clean environment to avoid spreading germs in a pandemic with that situation?

Mrs Wilson also pointed out that we may have a New Day government, but the civil servants are still working from the old days before that and have a record of all the dialogue back and forth – so why start from scratch again? People know the situation, people know what has been agreed – the minister should have that information from her first week in office.

Are the union’s issues being kicked back into the long grass again to deal with later? That won’t end well – and the union was right on many issues with regard to school preparedness previously.

Some of these issues go well beyond issues such as pay and promotions, but deal directly with the state of the schools we are sending our children to. These schools should, of course, have been ready back in September. The previous administration will have played a part in that too – but here we are nearly in February when children have been out of the classroom, making it the ideal time to get work done. We should be a lot further along than we are – and not tackling the issues raised won’t get us there any faster.