BWU will take health, safety breaches to Labour Department

The Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) has warned employers that it will not hesitate to escalate persistent health and safety breaches to the Labour Department, amid growing unease about the conditions under which some Barbadians are required to work.

On Friday, BWU Deputy General Secretary Dwaine Paul told the media that despite years of complaints, too little has been done to safeguard employees in several sectors.

“For years we’ve had complaints about a number of conditions, whether it relates to health and safety matters, whether it relates to pay and we’ve been checking on those and we’ve been challenging them collectively and we wanted to really get out there and to see for ourselves,” Paul said during a media briefing at the Frank Walcott Labour College after a tour of various business places.

“In today’s exercise we want to draw the attention to one of the health and safety conditions that still remains, in our view, not adequately addressed for workers. We all know how hot it has been today…. We still find that in warehouses, for example, we have not done enough in our view, whether from an administrative standpoint, whether from a Labour Department standpoint to ensure that the warehouses that people are required to work in on a day-to-day basis are adequately outfitted and adequately inspected to ensure that those working conditions are equal to or better than the offices where the people that manage these places sit in every day.”

Paul blasted the imbalance in treatment between management and frontline staff. “One of the trends that we came across today is that we build nice little cubicles in the warehouses for the managers and so we just sit down in the air condition while the men and women who are bearing the brunt of the work of getting the products out to people and driving the money for the business are drenched in sweat and nobody seems to remember that these buildings need to be properly ventilated, properly inspected. We walked into warehouses where from the time you hit the door the dust was hitting in your throat but yet people are walking up and down insisting that these people produce every day.”

He continued: “There’s a large cry in Barbados about workers needing to be more productive but productivity comes from having facilities that enable workers to produce. So if you’re going to ask for it, shut up and put up and fix these places so that workers can indeed produce.”

Paul stressed that the BWU is prepared to press further if necessary. “This is also a signal to the Labour Department that we would expect where the code, the health and safety act is not being enforced, that we will also be calling on them to join us to ensure that this situation is addressed and corrected because those are our brothers and sisters working in those same warehouses that we saw today.”

BWU General Secretary Toni Moore echoed the concerns, noting that a lack of enforcement was undermining workplace protections across industries.

“Very recently we’ve been having a series of discussions within the construction sector and coming out of those discussions, although the union had called for it before, we have received an agreement from the government that the Labour Department will be properly resourced, that a number of officers at different levels in the structure of the Labour Department will be added to ensure that what we the Barbados Workers Union are prioritising in our strategy, and that’s the issue of enforcement, to ensure that that can be done,” Moore said.

“We have job sites where inspections are not being done so certain things are not being enforced. Although the focus was not construction today while we were on the road we were speaking to construction workers seeing them working in garden boots, one man taped up with duct tape the boots and where they have to buy their PPE, but yet the companies are around here and expanding and the companies are growing at the time that we are in a construction boom but not doing right by workers.”

The BWU leader also raised the long-standing concern about the “one door” policy in retail stores across Bridgetown, which has repeatedly drawn warnings from the Barbados Fire Service.

“It is not a safe space to have just one door to enter and exit,” Moore stressed. “We have already seen deaths in this country as a result of that particular reality. The union remains concerned… Incrementally, there are a number of active steps that are being taken to address this, but that is something that my colleagues are raising before the Labour Department.” (SZB)