It seems to me that every Jack, Tom and Harry coroporate businesses is using the recession excuse to conveniently layoff their workers.And what makes this situation so shameful is that even some businesses that are making super profits in this time is also using the same lame excuse. But yet still the fat cats that make up the upper management continues to enjoy hugh finacial reward and job security…..and golden parachutes when they depart.The common working people will always be the sacrificial lamb .We must bite the bullet and ban our belly in hard times.I donot have an answer to how we as a society can fairly distribute the slices of the pie more equitably but the present system is a dismal failure and I think we can do much better.How can we achieve basic econnomic prosperity for most when the present economic model is a zero- sum game, survival of the fittest and a dog eat dog world ? Capitalism gone mad(a phrased borrow from sparrow) is the order of the day.

@Themis

Economic difficulties you wrote? How much profits has LIME been pocketing? Have they tried other approaches to cost savings to protect jobs? Even the Prime Minister has been asking companies to hold strain. What about all the other companies small medium and large currently losing money? The precedent has been set.

Barbadians need to remember when the economy improves all the companies like LIME, OMC, Ansa Macal etc who elected to send home people at this time.

@Themis

It is there legal right who can deny?

If all other companies which we suggest maybe in a worse position than LIME did the same what do you think would be the economic fallout?

In such an environment of rampant layoffs and job loses do you think LIME would have the subcriber base to maintain profit margins? This is a difficult time for the world and in such times it calls for all the stakeholders to make sacrifices. It must be the government only to do so? Then we hear the opposition and others talking about too much government intervention? Here is an opportunity for private sector led strategies to protect the integrity of the whole.

As stated before Barbadians should be made NEVER to forget who jumped ship in times of extrondinary difficulty, it was the companies making huge profits!

Tell us more.

I do not know if LIME practices unified pricing, ie that the prices for services across the region are the same in all locations once they are converted to a common currency. My impression is that they do not (based on seeing prices for BlackBerries in Jamaica, BVI, Trinidad over the past 18 months.) LIME’ operations are not the same in terms of the conditions given to customers: in Barbados, for example, you buy the BlackBerry device and pay for an plan, but the phone is locked to LIME. You can go to have it unlocked locally (say B$100) or abroad, but that then violates the conditions and if there is a problem with the phone later, too bad. In Trinidad, I understand, you can buy unlocked BlackBerries, even at LIME outlets, and then opt to use it with any provider. (In the US, you can take a T-Mobile contract and after 90 days they will send the code to unlock the device FOR FREE, if requested. In my case, I pleaded for that to be done after 30 days, and it was granted.). So, we have a few things to look at and think about. (I cannot speak from experienc with Digicel, with whom I have have limited contact because of their generally poor customer relations.)

Public comment in Barbados (including just now on VOB and a current thread on BFP) indicate a raft of serious ongoing problems with the service provided. So, that has to be factored into what decisions are being made for changes here.

I think that LIME should do some good PR and explain its actions in a regional context, but of course they are not obliged to do that.

Where I think Trottie loses credibility with many people is that he likes to bully those whom he feels he can yet is timid where the other party has adequate cojones. He loves to posture about “Massa” when it suits him but does not seem to realise that times have changed and that particular tune is no longer a hit these days. It is time that the Union(s) move on and get into the current business and social environment. Their present bargaining tactics and strategies no longer fit or are really relevant to our modern society.

Here is a company despite meeting with PM Thompson on holding strain for a few months continues on its merry way. Carrying a couple hundred staff on payroll for a year will bankrupt this company? What about the cost linked to the destruction of goodwill?

One real issue here is the fact that jobs are being terminated in a Barbados (that achieves the highest profits for C&W in the C’bean) and similar jobs are being created elsewhere namely Jamaica (that achieves large losses).

The Barbados work force is being depleted. It’s is also amazing the in Barbados folks making 2500 – 5000 per month are being dismissed so that Senior Management can justify continuing to make 20,000 to 30,000 monthly.

What is doubly amazing is the number of Ex-pats working on the island doing jobs that Barbadians can perform, making 20,000+ per month with housing and vehicle costs attibuted to their jobs, while the company is continuing on the on the ‘freeway of bulldozing’ by dismissing the lower paid works under the guise of economic hardship and lost of profits.

If a company that can make net profits of 90+ MIL and 66+MIL can send home 150 workers, then woe to those who work for companies that only achieve 1M net profits.

Keeping wages down controls inflationary pressures, (yet Wall Street robber-barons vote themselves million dollar bonuses) while deflationary pressures coupled with the risk of spiraling out of control “hyper-inflation” in the next year will wipe out any possibility of keeping prices stable or at bay.

Also, for the poor China has created a niche where there is a created market for cheap, shoddy goods where the poor pay more for them than there are worth.

Overall, one can argue that the ideological roots of the perpetuation of poverty are in many ways fueled by the capitalist ethic.

Economic policy seems to benefit those at the high end of the market. The poor remain servile.

Macro-structural policies on the part of governments produces very little to combat poverty. Actually “BIG” business and government eat from the same plate and somehow are strange bedfellows.

Financial politics fueled by global capitalist interests reduces the role of governments as the distributors of wealth, to merely the “lip-servants” of political spin.

Systematic discrimination, access to credit, low job skills and opportunity, diminishing educational options, family instability and vulnerability to unemployment has in no doubt created the “culture of poverty” and is responsible for the contemporary deprivation still so prevalent in most towns and cities in our world today.

Look at Los Angeles for example, (the epicenter of Hollywood celebrity glitz and glamor) with its estimated 500 gated subdivisions, 2000 street gangs, 4000 mini malls, 20,000 sweatshops and 150,000 homeless residents has become a “dystopian symbol of Dickensian inequalities and intractable racial contradictions” (Harvey 1990) and where Hollywood glamorizes both the polarity of acute poverty and exorbitant wealth without subconscious collective recognition of the real facts. A cognitive dissonance that few would find hard to elucidate.

But that is our world. Barbados is not exempt from the social and economic tyranny – actually, there is no safe-harbor anywhere…

Make the best of what you got!!!

I think the BWU has lost it usefullness to the barbadian worker. It appears they overplayed their hands on the Royal Shop and Sandy Lane issues and other companies are seeing the holes in the union. Also it seems the BWU is in support of non-nationals competing with and in many cases ROBBING bajan workers many of whom are unionised, out of work. These foreign corporation and putting bajans on the breadline but the BWU can only blow hot air, if it was the B’dos Port they would want to cripple barbados to force management to re-employ a worker who might have been wrong..

The BWU is its own worst enemy. For too long they’ve sat on their laurels and allow their members to take part in illegal strikes if they were not pleased with a particular situation. Where is the leadership in all that? They’ve sent out the wrong signal to its members as to what their roles are in relation to the employer/employee relationship. It’s not all about the employee and their wants and needs. I don’t know of any entity that will allow its workers to dictate how they should run their business. A company goes into business to make a profit. Their business is not hiring people, it’s making money and the people are just the means to an end. It might not be what Sir Roy wants to hear BUT it’s the reality. I’ve been appalled on several occasions by his lack of leadership and his arrogance. Sandy Lane and Royal Shop are two good examples of “rebel tactics” displayed by the workers and Sir Roy had the nerve to expect these businesses to rehire these jokers. Before Lime started laying off its workers, the service left a lot to be desired and that’s with the big salaries and benefits they were paid. Now that they’ve laid off hundreds, you can’t really tell the difference in service since it was crappy to begin with. I think Lime has finally realized that if they can provide the same level of service with less, why the hell not? Sir Roy can have as many meetings as he chooses but the dye has been cast with Lime and they’re not turning back. I’m sure Sir Roy is starting to worry about the union’s dwindling union fees and their drop in profits. Like LIME, the union is a business and right now, it’s a business that’s losing control and money. Sir Roy must be having some sleepless nights.

He can always sell his Knighthood and the Mercedes!

@ROK

We should all be thanking you et al. Keep up the good work on behalf of the people!

ROK….I don’t quite understand what it is you’re trying to say in the two paragraphs you just wrote except for the part of you not liking my analysis.

@Themis
“But in fact, the ultimate decision of whether or not to dismiss because of economic difficulties expressly lies with the Employer under the Protocol. The Union is of course given the right to be informed and to be consulted, but not the right to tell an employer how to run its business.”

Are you correct about that? I somehow feel that a protocol being an agreement, is a legal document enforceable in a court of law. Businesses cannot be allowed to do as they please and enter a plea of profitability without having to prove it.

There are several provisions in law which seem to be supporting me here. Unfair dismissal and breaches of employment contracts for starters.

I cannot state with any accuracy what the industrial relations bill says about employment off the top of my head, but I am sure that there is protection there too.

As David said, leadership is essential to navigating such waters. there is a lot that we have not tested in the law courts and to tell the truth, our close knit legal fraternity is not creative enough. I think the culture of the legal fraternity prevents such creativity.

In using lawyers we should be mindful that lawyers receive instructions and should be guided by instructions. Advice is one thing but what the client wants to achieve is another thing. It cannot only be about being on the safe side otherwise we would never break through. It has to be about arguing rights and proceeding to a new frontier; paradigm even.

@ecoanalyst
“No country with high telecom costs can prosper in an interconnected electronic world, especially one that depends on long stay tourism, and a “service economy”. Maybe this government, like the previous one, forgets that this is an island and all communications, especially air travel, must be at the lowest cost to facilitate development.”

I thought that I was the only person with that view. I have not heard it from anybody else. This was one of BANGO’s strong arguments in the C&W rate hearing. We argued that we cannot be disadvantaged on all fronts and with the world going digital, the one thing we need to be going for us as a service economy is communications, if nothing else.

The days of big transnational corporations, like LIME, coming into Barbados, and being allowed by joke DLP and BLP governments to set up monopolies, or to take over pre-existing monopolies, in whatever areas, and thereafter being allowed by these said governments and, by extension, many peoples of this country, to provide mediocre products and services, whilst amassing huge profits on the basis of serious political exploitation of the masses and middle classes, must surely – at this stage of our country’s history – be brought to an end by the very politically organized and conscious of the masses and middle classes of people of this country.

And, also, those days of the Barbados Workers Union, the National Union of Public Workers, and all other workers unions in this country being allowed by the masses and middle classes to exist in this country, even though it is clear that they altogether have been representing a largely by-gone political industrial era, and even though it is clear that they have been massively failing to help usher in a new era of greater democracy and ownership in this country, must also – at this juncture of our country’s history – be brought to an end by the very politically organized and conscious of the masses and middle classes of people of this country.

For, it is very pellucidly clear to our very progressive party and to many thousands of progressive others in Barbados that companies, like LIME, and so-called political labour organizations, like the BWU and the NUPW, are all part and parcel of the diabolical process of the political dictatorial control and social degradation and dehumanization of the broad masses and middle classes of people of this country.

Of course, there is an abundance of historical and current evidence to support these facts- which we in PDC do NOT have the time to get into at this stage.

But, surely, it is an incontrovertible fact that all companies and workers union leaderships and several internal union committees that exist in Barbados, are blatantly using present day workers as pawns and sacrificial lambs in their respective political power plays, and in their social grandstanding and money grabbing profiteering exercises.

And, therefore, as far as the average “right thinking” Barbadian is concerned – such rotten mal-behaviourisms will NOT change until the root structure and culture of human organization surrounding commercial and industrial activity in this country is totally reformed and or transformed in this country, esp. to give greater power, authority and entitlement to present day workers of this country.

That is why many people in Barbados must see the People’s Democratic Congress as existing to represent an enormously needed thrust toward a new political industrial era in Barbados – which must include the fact that anytime we and our supporters accede to governmental office in this country it shall be found that legislation will be passed to make sure, et al:

1) that the ONLY multi-member corporate business entities possible shall be those of partnerships in the government and private sectors of this country. Thus there shall NO LONGER BE COMPANIES, STATUTORY CORPORATIONS, THE MINISTRY OF GOVERNMENT, in the country;

2) that all foreign corporations or companies seeking to operate in Barbados shall do so only on the basis that they form alliances or joint ventures with those partnerships already existing in Barbados – and to which these foreign enterprises shall only be capable of owning a maximum of 51 % ownership in these enterprises;

3) that all workers who shall be alive, and working in the government and private sectors at the time that legislation is passed, shall be transformed from the status of workers to the status of being part owners ( partners) in the enterprises in which they would be working in then or in any future ones to be founded in this country. Of course, these persons would be brought on par with existing real owners of enterprises ( NOT share owners) in Barbados;

4) that all such persons are remunerated in dividends/profits per weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc. and NOT ANY LONGER wages and salaries;

4) that all such persons shall be given all necessary access to all information and know-how pertaining to the entire functioning of these partnership enterprises; and

5) that such persons shall have greater say in the direction and operation of these partnerships, and in the make up of the directorates of these partnerships.

So, in concluding we in PDC ask many persons who are reading this article to lend their support to these kinds of policies which clearly represent the ushering in of a new era of greater democracy, ownership and responsibility for the vast majority of people of Barbados, and which clearly represents the necessary beheading of the oligarchic political, corporate and union culture in Barbados.

So, down with the damn DLP and the blasted BLP.

PDC

@Themis

“What the BWU is seeking is the ability to say “No, you can’t dismiss these workers”. Nowhere in the Protocol permits that.”

I don’t think that is it. I believe the protocol states that ‘before any layoffs’ (I think it is greater than 10% of a workforce/department) The social partnership -NOT the union alone- should discuss alternative in an effort to reduce the number of layoffs or redeployment in other areas of the organization or allow the displaced workers perhaps set u a company to offer similar services.

That clearly does not say that one cannot layoff, as a matter of fact I have heard trottie on the radio saying such, that they are not against layoffs but the matter here is this is a company that made in the past 3 years and average of 83 million net profit and they are pretty much saying we have not made enough! The workers are costing us too much.

Now if we can all agree that the company is justified in sending home the workers after such ridiculous profits then I am afraid I have to agree with “so.ur” last statements, because the company I work for only made 3.5 million last year, what if they too decide they have not made enough and decide to trim staff?

Terrance Blackett has made some valid points too.

“Keeping wages down controls inflationary pressures, (yet Wall Street robber-barons vote themselves million dollar bonuses)” – SPOT ON sir!

We should all investigate the bonuses at some of these local companies because I am sure that after the lower paid workers are dismissed the executive bonuses and salaries are increased.

“Economic policy seems to benefit those at the high end of the market. The poor remain servile. ” – WELL SAID!

@Themis

This contribution by Fruit Lover is a bit more palatable: “I don’t think that is it. I believe the protocol states that ‘before any layoffs’ (I think it is greater than 10% of a workforce/department) The social partnership -NOT the union alone- should discuss alternative in an effort to reduce the number of layoffs or redeployment in other areas of the organization or allow the displaced workers perhaps set u a company to offer similar services.”

If this is the vein of the protocol, it may very well be by honour only because there seems to be no commitment to keep the workers but to have dialogue in the event of layoffs.

In fact, Fruit Lover is mistaken in one respect. Consultation is not a matter for the social partnership, only the union and the employer.

@Rump
I see we on the same page about something.

@Themis

“In fact, the major agreement which contains terms of employment is NOT binding except in honour only, that is the collective agreement between employer and the representative union.”

You mixing up some things here. If it contains terms of employment it has to be legally binding as an agreement. Now a collective agreement is a different matter in the sense that we can collectively agree about procedure in light of eventualities which need not be binding.

Is there a copy of the protocol somewhere? I will look, but I was about to say that by honour or not, each case can only stand on its own merit; there are not too many generalities within this scope.

For example, you can do something and get away with it. I may do the same thing but get trapped by some detail which I overlooked. It could be simply perspective or just reasonable expectation.

@Themis

I was not aware that I was seeking advice. I certainly understand what I said. If you don’t understand don’t turn it back on me and tell me that I don’t understand. All I need to do is either see the document or be told by somebody what is in the document.

A-Fish
“ROK I think it’s high time Barbados should either nationalize the network, government get their own network or send tenders to a Communications Company to build one for Government.”

I wonder why you single me out. You looking to stir up trouble? My friend and colleague Chris and I are always at it about this. I keep telling him that it is not that nationalisation is the most desireable option, but in the absence of good corporate governance of the network, there is really no other choice.

However, when I look at the legislation, I am also of the view that successive governments have allowed C&W/lime to get its way. Not sure why?

So then you weight the facts: bad corporate governance on the one hand and lack of enforcement on the other hand. Certainly there has to be great weight on government for not effectively enforcing the legislation. So if our government allowing it to get out of hand, we could talk as much as we like, there will be no nationalisation; because the Government would have proved to be not serious, and the situation will continue; as you can see.

I think this must be tested in court. My hands are full right now but very soon, probably in the next three or so months, we will start the process which may lead to seeking an order of mandamus from the High Court. More later.

@ROK: “My friend and colleague Chris and I are always at it about this. I keep telling him that it is not that nationalisation is the most desireable option, but in the absence of good corporate governance of the network, there is really no other choice.

My dear friend ROK (smile)…

As I know you know, my counter is the fundamental issue is not the lack of corporate governance. To the contrary. The Company is Managing extremely well. Within the framework created, and manage, by the *Government*.

Hummm…

@A-Fish: “I’m still wondering why is government allowing all of this to happen under their watch especially with the FTC.

An excellent question.

@A-Fish: “Also where is the true competition?

Another excellent question.

We, the People, keep being told that we now have a “liberalized marketplace”. And yet, for some reason, we are still paying way too much for all telecommunications services (et al).

Hummmmm…

Back to ROK…

Do you *really* want the Government to run the telecommunications infrastructure; a *much* more complicated enterprise than, for example, supplying water?

Or, for that matter, simply managing the marketplace for the benefit of the consumer??? Which is what the FTC is supposed to be doing…

Be careful what you wish for my friend….