The Tribune

Executives at the trade union representing the Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) line staff yesterday said they had displayed “Job’s patience”, accusing management of stalling negotiations on a new industrial agreement.

The Bahamas Communications and Public Officers Union’s (BCPOU) secretary-general, Dino Rolle, said it was “heartless” that BTC was proposing to eliminate employee increments.    

The union reiterated calls for Prime Minister Perry Christie and Cable and Wireless Communications (CWC) chief executive, Phil Bentley, to intervene and cause BTC chief Leon Williams and his management team to meet with the union and negotiate an industrial agreement for line-staff.

Mr Rolle told Tribune Business that the union was prepared to do whatever was necessary to get management to treat employees with fairness and respect. He alleged that BTC has repeatedly cancelled scheduled meetings at the last minute over the past several weeks.

  “The BCPOU has exercised tremendous restraint during these talks. We have operated in good faith with the company and have displayed Job’s patience as management, on several occasions cancelled, at times at the last minute and called off meetings,” said Mr Rolle.

   “Our employer BTC has decided that going forward they do not want increments to be a part of our industrial agreement. Those are annual increments based on evaluations. We strongly objected to them eliminating those increments.”

    Mr Rolle added that while BTC seemed to be having difficulty compensating its staff, it was a major sponsor for two recent high-profile events, the IAAF World Relays and the Bahamas Junkanoo Carnival.

“We don’t have a problem with BTC being a good corporate sponsor, but they have to make sure that the staff is taken care of. It seems as if anyone who walks through the door is getting sponsored by BTC but the employees are not getting what they are asking for,” Mr Rolle told Tribune Business.

He said BTC staff were in a state of uncertainty over their job security following what he described as a failed voluntary separation exercise (VSEP) by the company, which had left morale “in the pits”.

“The staff doesn’t know who will be leaving and what criteria they would use. The staff is in the dark,” Mr Rolle said.

Prior to the Easter holidays, Mr Williams sent a memo to staff advising that due to the small number of voluntary separation package applications, the company was moving to compulsory redundancies.

In February it was announced that BTC - which has just over 700 employees - planned to cut jobs to reduce its operational costs in preparation for competition in the mobile sector. BTC is reportedly seeking to cut as many as 150 jobs.