Ministry labelled slow to act on workers’ issues
While disgruntled employees can bring their issues to the attention of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, veteran trade unionist Senator Lambert Brown says he is not too happy with the pace at which it has been responding to complaints from some workers.
“I know that there are cases where people have been waiting for a long time to get redress from the Ministry of Labour. I know of a case involving a manager who was dismissed last year and has been waiting for an answer for several months now from the ministry. The last meeting was in June,”
Brown said.
“I know of another case where the ministry is waiting for the Attorney
General’s Office for over a year to give them advice.”
James Stewart*, 25, got the shock of his life earlier this year when he called the Ministry of Labour to lodge a complaint about a former employee and was advised that it made no sense to pursue the matter. Stewart was employed to one of the country’s business process outsourcing (BPO) centres, and had issues regarding his salary while at the organisation.
“I spoke to someone who got me on to a consultant at the Ministry of Labour,” he said. “He (consultant) said that since there are so many jobs like that, just go ahead and get another one and forget about them,” he recounted.
BPO SECTOR DOESN’T ENCOURAGE UNIONISATION
Stewart had worked at several call centres over the last few years, but he said that he was generally relieved of his job during the three-month probationary period for one reason or another.
Frustrated by the fact that workers seem to have very little recourse in the industry once they do not make it past three months, he has been hoping to find employment in another field. Davis Whyte finds that the BPO sector does not generally encourage unionisation, but she said they are subject to the laws of the land.
“They employ a lot of persons, and the information that we have is that they don’t encourage union representation, although I don’t think that any union has tried to go in there in a concerted kind of way because you are not getting persons coming to you saying that they want to be unionised. Because the environment there is such that they don’t encourage unionisation, it means that you would have to be organising the workers almost surreptitiously, and that becomes very difficult because of the kind of shifts and so on that they generally work,” she said.
Davis Whyte finds that fear is one of the factors that would curtail efforts to join a union, especially since persons would want to make it past the three-month probationary period.
“That is not something that is peculiar to the BPO industry either, but from the information that we have, the BPO industry now operates in a similar fashion, as did the factories in the garment freezones when they just opened up in the 1980s and, I think, as a result, workers might be fearful,” she said, while adding that the same is true for security guards.
The propensity towards contract labour, she finds, has been another factor contributing to far fewer persons joining unions, although she noted that some unions have been able to achieve growth despite the current labour culture.
She remains optimistic, however, as the Government has signed off on the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Agenda, which places them in a position to ensure that at least the basic minimum standards for workers are being maintained. *Name changed