Independent Senator Monique Taitt wants to know where is the financial allocation in the national budget for the Employment Rights Tribunal (ERT) to get on with its work.
“I don’t see anything other than payments for the staff and the members of the tribunal…. We have the potential to make things make sense and make them work,” she said in a frank analysis of the fiscal measures as debate continued in the Senate on Wednesday, on the Appropriation Bill.
Taitt detailed the poor pay made to the highly qualified members of the ERT, insisting that better must be done across the board, as she briefly disclosed that the island’s senators were also poorly remunerated.
“The chairman [of the ERT] gets $310 a month and around $150 a hearing…. The other eight members, including two deputy chairpersons, receive $120 per sitting and approximately $230 per month. Some sittings last up to three hours. There have been no adjustments for the nine years that the ERT has been in operation.
“The minister recently boasted that there currently is a 4-0 record at the appellate level in favour of the tribunal, which is testament to the quality of the decisions. Yet, chairpersons are not compensated for the time spent researching and writing decisions. Sometimes they have to leave their practice and travel overseas and be away for two weeks to do decisions so that they’re not distracted. And you can tell me that you’re paying somebody $200/$300 per month plus $100 for a hearing that lasts a minimum of three hours,” the senator said.
Taitt pointed out that the low pay was further compounded by the dearth of resources at the ERT. She noted that the tribunal has been without a chairman since Retired Justice Christopher Blackman stepped down in March last year.
With a staff complement of three, including the registrar, a secretary and a clerk, Taitt further lamented that nine years after its establishment, the ERT still has no dedicated meeting space.
“That’s another set of madness. So the majority of hearings are conducted on Zoom. You can do that with straightforward cases, you can even do that with severance but you see where you need to see people’s body language and thing, this is not tenable. By now you must have somewhere for the people to go. They need a location, they need to establish panels. You need to give them a secretariat,” she said.
The practising attorney-at-law added: “You need to pay people promptly because people take pride in what they do. There will come a point where you’re gonna lose good people because they just can’t sustain their lives anymore when it takes such a chunk of their time and they’re not paid for it. They have to be able to make a reasonable living.”
Taitt warned that the current state of affairs was encouraging backlog in another environment that could well be avoided.
“You already got backlog going on in the Supreme Court and by the very setup of this employment rights tribunal, you are going to have backlog.
I am personally familiar with the case where the person was unfairly dismissed going on six/seven years. His matter has not come off for hearing yet.”
The independent senator made a case for the government to look at setting up a fund to assist persons with appeals or establish a set of lawyers who they pay to help people who appeal anything before the tribunal “because the cases that are the star cases with the Employment Rights Tribunal are the people with the money; they are the ones who can appeal.”
