Employment tribunal case backlog, laws in BEC’s sights

huge backlog of cases before the Employment Rights Tribunal (ERT) has prompted the Barbados Employers’ Confederation (BEC) to call for a significant adjustment in the tribunal’s administrative structure.

However, BEC Director Sheena Mayers-Granville, citing a survey of 40 000 members, issued a laundry list of changes to the Employment Act, with the ERT’s slow movement as a persistent issue.

“We understand that there are over 400 outstanding cases before the ERT, and while we are in discussions with the ministry on how to improve the functioning of the Employment Rights Tribunal, we are also quite aware that the administrative structures would need to be improved to assist in that vein,” she told reporters on Monday.

“We are quite aware that chiefly the Ministry of Labour has the responsibility for enforcing labour legislation, and we know the Employment Rights Tribunal has its expanded mandate for adjudicating cases. However, we are concerned about the resources available to these institutions. One thing the BEC would wish to highlight is that before we add new legislation, let’s ensure that our enforcement agencies are properly resourced.”

Mayers-Granville also said the BEC wants the Employment Rights Act changed to shrink the rewards for workers who are found to have been partially responsible for their termination.

“Where the tribunal sees that the employee has been involved in the reason for their termination, that tribunal should have the ability to reduce the amount of financial award granted to the employee,” she said.

The employers also want the law on redundancy changed to exempt an employer who is laying off a single employee from the mandatory six-week period of consultation, establishing a minimum threshold instead, the BEC director added.

Another area of attention highlighted in the survey was revisions to minimum wage regulations that the BEC insists should be driven by data. Mayers-Granville maintained that while the confederation fully supported modifications to keep up with the cost of living, such changes should be justified by valid evidence.

“As we hear the call for a review of the minimum wage, we recognise the importance of labour statistics and data to inform the deliberators and the final outcome of minimum wage discussions,” she said. “We would wish to highlight that for numerous years, the BEC has advocated that the Minimum Wage Board needs to be engaged in continuous review to allow for incremental changes to the minimum wage, as opposed to large leaps after a number of years.

“We also want to indicate that minimum wage increases should be based on an equation that has two sides – you must look at cost of living, but also you must look at the level of productivity within our workforce; those things require data.”

Gail-Ann King, the BEC’s president, told journalists her organisation was concerned with the length of time given to review legislation on workforce conditions. The call comes after a bruising fight earlier this year with lawmakers over the passage of a workplace standards law on businesses taking concessions from the government.

King said: “We are indeed noticing a trend of shorter and shorter timelines when it comes to responding to policy and legislation, relative to the issuance of the necessary documentation, giving us very restrictive timeframes to be able to get back with an informed position on the issue at hand. It is against this backdrop that the BEC is calling for a mandatory national standard of time, which would give us as a representative organisation and other stakeholders, enough time to fully vet upcoming bills, and provide fair and balanced feedback to the government.

“The proposed national standard of time would need to be discussed at the tripartite level; however, the amount of time given to stakeholders should be measured in weeks, certainly not days and hours.”

King added: “We are asking for some time for persons to properly review [legislation]…. We don’t want legislation and decisions that are short-sighted.”

(SB)