The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Chamber’s chairman yesterday said agreed changes to the labour law reforms “seem to have held”, as numerous draft Bills were circulated between the Government, private sector and trade unions in a bid to conclude the controversial exercise.

Gowon Bowe told Tribune Business that the negotiations had come down to “the devil in the details”, and ensuring the language in the final Employment Act and Industrial Relations Act reforms reflected what has been agreed between the three sides.

“We’ve had various drafts in terms of things they’re considering, and that we’ve submitted back to them,” Mr Bowe said.

“The principles we’d all agreed on seem to have held. It’s the devil in the details to ensure that the language is amended to what we thought it would be.”

The Chamber chairman declined to detail the changes obtained by the private sector, but acknowledged that efforts to finalise the labour law reforms were taking place “in a compressed timeframe”, with the Government delaying plans to bring the revised Bills to the House of Assembly yesterday.

The debate, and hoped-for passage, of the amendments will now take place tomorrow (see article on Page 3B), with the Government’s legislative drafters having to respond to multiple commentaries and feedback.

“I don’t envy the drafters, because they’re having to take instructions from all corners,” Mr Bowe said. “There’s various commentaries and other elements, and I’m sure the labour organisations are also having their input.

“We are just creating the check-list to make sure we don’t miss something in our review.”

Mr Bowe added that the Government’s decision to delay restarting debate on the two Bills in the House of Assembly was an indication that “the cool heads are prevailing, they’re not trying to rush things and are doing it in a very deliberative manner.

“For that we must be grateful, and we plod on.”

The Christie administration now finds itself having to accomplish an extremely difficult ‘balancing act’ between the competing interests, and desires, of the private sector and the Bahamian trade union/labour movement.

Businesses feared the initial Bills would “cripple” and “bankrupt” them, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), through the introduction of labour-friendly reforms that threatened to increase the cost and bureaucratic burden on the private sector.

Some, such as Atlantis, suggested that the reforms represented an unwarranted intrusion and interference into how employers ran their businesses.

Given the private sector push back, the Government is faced with having to weaken some anti-business aspects of the reforms in an environment where union/labour expectations have been raised just prior to a general election.

Despite Mr Bowe’s optimistic outlook, many employers will likely believe their concerns have been heard only when they seem them incorporated into the revised Employment Act and Industrial Relations Act recommendations.

Robert Sands, president of the Bahamas Hotel and Restaurant Employers Association (BHREA), yesterday told Tribune Business that the matter was now “in the Government’s court” to resolve.

“We’ve made our recommendations and had multiple meetings, and I think it’s in the Government’s court now,” he said.

“We just have to wait and see when it will be tabled. We were told it may be tabled today [yesterday], and have not heard otherwise.”

Mr Sands said the BHREA had yet to receive revised drafts of the labour law reforms, and added: “We’ll just have to wait until the Government tables it, and we are very hopeful that our deliberations were productive.”

Peter Goudie, one of the private sector’s representatives on the National Tripartite Council, told Tribune Business he had “not got a clue” as to the fate of the labour law reforms and revisions to them,.

“They were supposed to introduce something today,” he added of the Government, “and they were playing around with a number of amendments.”

Some employers, meanwhile, reacted with horror yesterday to proposed reforms submitted by the trade unions, which call for a $5,000 per day fine to be imposed on companies who fail to meet the 45-day deadline to begin industrial agreement talks with a recognised union.

Rick Lowe, an executive with the Nassau Institute think-tank, told Tribune Business that the union demands were “beyond the pale’, with others questioning why the latter should escape punishment for their own infractions, such as failing to file timely annual returns.

“What makes the unions so special when businesses are not special?” asked Mr Lowe. “Surely the law should not put one group above the other as far as the law is concerned?

“It’s beyond the pale. We’re all in this to survive, not destroy each other. It’s disturbing and discouraging that the Government will entertain such extremes. I can’t understand why they go to the extremes they go to.”