UWU workers at Portvale still off the job

General secretary of Unity Workers’ Union (UWU) Caswell Franklyn has pledged continued industrial action at Portvale sugar factory until “good sense prevails”.

He said UWU members showed up at the country’s lone sugar factory in Blowers, St James, yesterday morning, but were off the job again.

“My members turned up for duty and they were told that some of them were being placed on shift, and those [workers] were going to have to go back home. Well, we don’t have any agreement to that effect, so our members are going back home, including the ones that are supposed to work today,” he noted.

Franklyn said he also received official correspondence from the Barbados Energy and Sugar Company Inc. (BESCO) yesterday stating that it would not be recognising his union as a negotiating body for its workers.

He said the letter, posted March 19, signed by general manager Marlon Munroe and copied to the Chief Labour Officer, outlined BESCO’s position by affirming it was already in advanced negotiations with the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU), and to engage in parallel talks would “be inconsistent with established industrial relations practice and would undermine the integrity of the collective bargaining process already under way”.

However, Franklyn deemed this as “nonsense”, stressing that the UWU had the vast majority of sugar workers as members, so any negotiations without it were not right.

“The history of this is that the factory was first run by the Barbados Agricultural Management Company. That company made everybody redundant and paid them out in December 2023. The new company, the Barbados Energy and Sugar Company Inc., was established and started in January 2024.

“No members of their workforce joined the Barbados Workers’ Union at that point, so it would be [wrong] to now say that they were representing workers. I understand their difficulty because they were representing the sugar industry since the 1940s, and now it looks bad that they don’t have any sugar workers in their union,” he said.

He charged that while BESCO seemingly wanted to work with the BWU and felt “comfortable” with it, the workers felt otherwise.

Franklyn said established industrial relations practices dictated that a company must determine which union represented the majority of its workers and negotiate with that entity.

One of the major points of contention was a clause in the workers’ contract which outlined the hours the workers were expected to work. He said the contract pre-dated BESCO.

“Clause 5.1 says: ‘During the crop season, factory operations are 24 hours . . . . If you are assigned shift work, you will be required to work eight-hour shifts, working an average of 56 hours a week’.

‘Contrary to laws’

“If you’re working 56 hours, that’s seven days a week. So they are requiring you to work seven days a week. That is contrary to the laws of Barbados, because Portvale is a shop, by definition, under the Shops Act, and the Shops Act requires them to work five days a week, two off, and no more than eight hours a day, 40 hours a week,” he explained.

The union leader said the sugar workers were ready and able to work but would not do so under unfair rules.

He also accused management of Portvale of not having the proper equipment ready yet to grind cane, causing cane to “pile up and rot”, as well as those in charge of the industry of refusing to properly communicate with the workers.

“Now, the workers are particularly aggrieved because so far, nobody in the hierarchy, from minister to the chairman of the board, has ever come and said, ‘What is the problem?’ Nobody has ever spoken to the workers, and nobody has asked what the workers are saying. That is the problem that we are having. The workers will continue their industrial action until good sense prevails. They are not slaves; they deserve proper time off,” he declared.

Attempts to get a response from BESCO or the BWU were unsuccessful.

Following initial strike action last week, Munroe said in a statement that BESCO’s current compensation model had been the standard for decades and was negotiated with the BWU, the recognised union representative, and any changes to that model could only be renegotiated with the BWU. As such, he labelled the action as a wildcat strike. (CA)

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