Hotel Union General Secretary Leo Douglas said Tuesday that since the signing of the $17 million industrial agreement, the union has encountered serious problems with Kerzner executives, particularly those employed at the Atlantis Royal Towers.
“I am very upset,” Mr. Douglas said. “Kerzner International managers are using a clause in the new contract to reprimand their employees left and right.
“Just recently, several persons were fired on the basis that they had failed to provide satisfactory service to hotel guests….People are piling up down at Workers House, bringing all kinds of concerns to the table that don’t make any sense.”
But Kerzner International’s Vice-President of Public Affairs Ed Fields said only that the new industrial agreement clearly lays out a grievance process to deal with such issues.
“That process,” he said, “painstakingly lays out [under] what terms employees can be reprimanded or any other disciplinary action to be taken, and if the employee feels that that disciplinary action was handed out unfairly, there are also procedures by which [he or she could] take recourse to have those reprimands reviewed.”
According to Mr. Douglas, middle managers at Kerzner International are now picking “anything out of their heads to reprimand hotel employees.”
“There have been no reports of guests complaining and this is the problem,” Mr. Douglas said. “A man is innocent until proven guilty or one has to at least say how the charges came about and they are not doing this. Management is simply using the clause for their own benefit.”
Hoping to leave behind their acrimonious relationship, hotel union executives and officials of the Hotel Employers Association at the time of the contract signing in January, expressed optimism that with time, diligence, honesty and dedication they will move forward amicably in building a foundation for a more competitive and profitable product.
But according to Mr. Douglas, this latest incident may provoke a situation where “the union is forced to go back where it was prior to a contract being signed.”
“The union has to do what it has to do,” Mr. Douglas told the Bahama Journal yesterday. “I am not going to allow the managers to mash up hotel employees as long as I am in this union.
“The people are tired of the way management is behaving under this new industrial agreement, which we just signed a few weeks ago. They have no respect and I have already told the executives that it is important they bring their managers in check because that is where the bulk of the complaints are coming from.
“The workers are saying that they are tired and upset and one day, things are going to reach a point where everything just boils over.”
These latest threats may come as a surprise to Kerzner officials and other hotel executives who breathed a collective sigh of relief at the signing of the contract.
The agreement came after 16 months of negotiations, which at the time were grueling and contentious.
Macushla N. Pinder, The Bahama Journal
