THREE hundred and eighty-five sugar workers from the Pan-Caribbean-run Monymusk and Frome sugar estates will be sent home today after the company advised them yesterday that their positions are to be made redundant.
Monymusk in Clarendon will lose 279 mainly field workers, while the 106 workers from the Frome estate to go is an almost even split between factory and field workers.
The bad news was announced at a planned union/management meeting with the affected workers at Monymusk, where the company said the cost of labour, poor yields and “environmental challenges” have negatively affected its operations.
“The workers at Monymusk today (yesterday) were very angry and disappointed that they have done everything possible in their power and only to reap the bitter result of being made redundant,” said Harold Brown, Bustamante Industrial Trade Union’s (BITU) deputy island supervisor in charge of the sugar sector, in an interview.
The union is, meanwhile, seeking to have the more than 100 field workers who were laid off in August, in addition to another 250 from Monymusk to receive their redundancy entitlements. He explained that the company claimed these were temporary workers, or on short-term contracts, but that at no point was it ever established to these workers that they were temporary. “These are deliberate strategies to frustrate individuals [and an] underhanded type of employment,” he claimed.
Brown said the redundancies at the end of the 2014/15 crop season in August were a sign of things to come. He said Pan-Caribbean wanted to cut the 385 workers in December, “but the union thought it was not in good taste to be dishing out bad news at Christmastime, hence they rescheduled for January”. He said this comes as a big blow not just to the workers, who he described as shell-shocked, but also their families and communities in Clarendon and Westmoreland.
The workers are expected to receive their notice pay on January 29 and their severance pay on February 12.
“When we inquire about the future of Monymusk the company is tight-lipped. The rep they sent to the meeting today (yesterday) was unable to shed any light on the future,” he stated.
The union official pointed out that the cuts brings, the total number of workers separated from their jobs in the industry through redundancy to 1,250 since the end of the 2014/15 crop year, noting that people employed to Everglades Farms, which runs the Long Pond and Hampden estates, are yet to receive all of their notice pay.
He argued that while Pan-Caribbean has made “massive” investments in the modernisation of the plants, and despite the “great talk” of expansion of the land area under cultivation, and the great hope those plans gave for sustainability of the sector, “We can’t speak on the results of those investments — but it would appear as if some of these investments have not gotten the desired results”.
Brown said the Government is “fully aware of what has been happening”, but has stayed “very quiet” about the loss of jobs.
“Many of these persons do not have an alternative. It is going to affect the families, it is going to affect their education, it is going to cause instability in most of these communities and contribute to more poverty,” he stated.
Pan-Caribbean represents the Chinese firm COMPLANT International Sugar Industry Limited to which Government divested its sugar assets at Monymusk, Frome, and Bernard Lodge in 2011.