PM Holds Firm on Position Regarding Sugar Redundancy

Prime Minister John Briceño is scheduled to meet with the Christian Workers Union on Monday to discuss the tumultuous state of affairs between the Port of Belize and the stevedores.  As we reported earlier this week, employees of P.B.L. effected a work-to-rule after repeatedly demanding that government compensate them for sugar redundancies after the shipment of bulk sugar was relocated to Big Creek a few years ago.  But G.O.B. remains resolute in its position and today PM Briceño echoed the sentiment that no one lost their job as a result of the transfer.  Here’s what he had to say ahead of Monday’s meeting.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“I’ve had several with the stevedores and every time we meet, we come with an agreement but it seems that when they leave the meeting they come up with other issues.  I said to them from the beginning, let‘s not talk about sugar or the sugar money.  I said, you have your position and we have our position that there is no claim for no kind of redundancy.  Nobody got fired, so there is no sugar money. But as a government, we are prepared to be able to address many of the pending issues between the stevedores and the Port of Belize so that we can modernize the port.  The way the port has been running for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years, it‘s not in the interest of the port or in the interest of the country and I have been explaining to the stevedores, now we have competition, there is more than one port.  So when you decide that you don‘t want to discharge a ship, the ship would either go back to their home country, quite likely the United States, or they go down south to discharge their container.  That‘s what happened with sugar.  So when they behave the way they do, they decide not to offload, they are shooting themselves in the foot.  We need to be able to find common ground where we both, stevedores, Port of Belize and the Government of Belize, that we want to find how we could move this forward, how we could modernize and that is the intent, to protect their interest.  I understand and we want to do that, that is why the government made an offer of one point five million dollars to say, listen, let‘s stop fighting about everything.  Let‘s come up with the new working practices.  You can‘t work more than fifteen hours and when you‘re finished working fifteen hours a new gang finishes if the ship is not finished offloading.  Let‘s look at the number of gangs, the port wanted to bring it down to twelve, there‘s fourteen and the stevedores said they would not accept it.  I said, okay, in the CBA that you have already signed you‘re talking about thirteen, okay, let‘s stay with thirteen.  So we‘ve agreed to that.  So, most of the things we‘ve agreed, they‘re just small little things.”