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Monday, February 24, 2025

Govt to close legal loopholes on workers’ severance $$

by

33 days ago
20250122
Minister of National Security, Fitzgerald Hinds responds to a question durng the sitting of the Senate yesterday.

Minister of National Security, Fitzgerald Hinds responds to a question durng the sitting of the Senate yesterday.

OFFICE OF THE PARLIAMENT

Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

The next PNM gov­ern­ment will pri­ori­tise clos­ing ex­ist­ing le­gal loop­holes that per­mit com­pa­nies that shut down not to pay work­ers. There are plans to have a labour in­spec­tor among au­tho­rised of­fi­cers in­ves­ti­gat­ing the traf­fick­ing of per­sons.

This was in­di­cat­ed, re­spec­tive­ly, by Labour Min­is­ter Stephen Mc Clashie and Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds re­spond­ing in yes­ter­day’s Sen­ate to dif­fer­ent ques­tions from UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark.

Mc Clashie in­di­cat­ed what a PNM gov­ern­ment would do “very ear­ly in its new tenure” af­ter Mark’s queried mea­sures en­sur­ing that Stork Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices’ 389 em­ploy­ees are ad­e­quate­ly com­pen­sat­ed in align­ment with the Re­trench­ment and Sev­er­ance Ben­e­fits Act (RS­BA).

Mc Clashie, de­tail­ing that act, said that the com­pa­ny was shut­ting down op­er­a­tions as op­posed to re­trench­ing.

“There­fore, this isn’t ex­press­ly gov­erned by this act, and present­ly, there are no leg­isla­tive pro­ce­dures in the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act (IRA) or RS­BA that re­quire the Labour Min­is­ter’s in­ter­ven­tion in re­la­tion to the clo­sure of busi­ness­es. How­ev­er, if the na­tion­al in­ter­est is threat­ened, the min­is­ter is em­pow­ered to in­ter­vene un­der sec­tions 56 and 65 of the IRA and will not hes­i­tate to.”

Mc Clashie said there was a vig­i­lant, recog­nised ma­jor­i­ty union at­tached to the com­pa­ny, and in the event of re­trench­ment, the col­lec­tive agree­ment be­tween par­ties pro­vid­ed for their com­pen­sa­tion, which would be su­pe­ri­or to the leg­is­lat­ed pro­vi­sions of the RS­BA.

“Al­so, non-unionised em­ploy­ees are en­ti­tled to be com­pen­sat­ed in ac­cor­dance with the RS­BA’s pro­vi­sions. In the event that these ben­e­fits are not re­ceived, those em­ploy­ees can di­rect­ly re­port their mat­ters to the min­is­ter,” he said.

Mc Clashie added, “Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion avail­able, con­sul­ta­tive talks are sched­uled be­tween the par­ties to ad­dress and re­solve the sit­u­a­tion. In this re­gard, man­age­ment and the union met this month. I’m al­so hap­py to re­port that 91 per cent of the dai­ly/hourly paid staff have been paid (ex gra­tia pay­ments) and left.

“The com­pa­ny’s con­sul­tant has ad­vised that a liq­uida­tor was ap­point­ed and re­main­ing staff were month­ly paid em­ploy­ees, whose re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in­volves the clos­ing of ad­min­is­tra­tive du­ties. The com­pa­ny ser­viced its last client in No­vem­ber 2024 and is of­fi­cial­ly closed.”

Mark asked whether the Gov­ern­ment was con­tem­plat­ing amend­ing—or con­sid­er­ing new laws—to deal with the loop­holes that per­mit com­pa­nies that shut down not to pay/ho­n­our pay­ments.

Mc Clashie said, ”Yes, the IRA and Sev­er­ance Ben­e­fit acts are both in ac­tive con­sid­er­a­tion cur­rent­ly. He said the Stork is­sue had def­i­nite­ly raised and iden­ti­fied a loop­hole.

“Since we don’t want cit­i­zens to be dis­ad­van­taged, I’ll take a per­son­al look to en­sure we look at how we can close that loop­hole if we haven’t al­ready con­sid­ered it,” Mc Clashie added.

Mark asked if since the “po­lit­i­cal clock is tick­ing away fast rush­ing to Au­gust 2025” (term’s end) whether amend­ments will be pre­sent­ed be­fore Par­lia­ment is dis­solved.

Mc Clashie said, “The clock is tick­ing—tick tock, tick tock—and giv­en the statu­to­ry re­quire­ments for elec­tions, I don’t think there’s enough time to dis­til those two pieces of law and rush them through be­cause we have an elec­tion. But on the re­turn of the PNM Gov­ern­ment, we’ll cer­tain­ly put it at the top of our agen­da for very ear­ly in our new tenure.”


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