Spencer
THE ADVOCACY group for employers says its sharp criticisms of the Labour Ministry and trade unions were meant to provoke dialogue "to bring a sense of order" to an increasingly adversarial industrial relations system after a series of strikes, some of which it claimed were unjustifiable.
The Labour Ministry has counted 227 strikes, sick-outs and other industrial actions for the fiscal year ending March 2006, its latest collated figures.
The Jamaica Employers Federation (JEF) said Wednesday it has tried to bring the unions to the table for talks, having watched the downward spiral in relations as work stoppages were substituted for skilful negotiations.
But a letter written to labour representatives in July has so far gone unanswered, the federation told the Financial Gleaner.
"Our intent is not to disrupt relations, but to raise concerns," said JEF's institutional and support manager, Herman Baker.
"We believe the release will spark dialogue."
Attempts at comment from union officials were unsuccessful.
Hostile tactics
The employers charged that a trend has emerged where trade unions have been using hostile tactics to gain the attention of high officials and to intimidate employers, where once they would have used skilfull negotiations and tactics such as 'ultimatums'.
But such techniques in the past have not always worked and some negotiations drag on, a fact the JEF acknowledged.
The federation also conceded that employers had been accused in the past of dragging out wage talks, but it nevertheless insisted that the responsibility was the unions' to bring the right amount of aggression to the bargaining table and to use ultimatums effectively to counter delays.
"Any grievance should use ultimatums before strikes," said Baker.
On Wednesday, the JEF also criticised the labour ministry, which it said no longer strictly enforced the 'back to work' rule, before moderating conciliation talks when negotiations between employers and their workers reach impasse.
Indiscipline
It was on that basis that the employers had charged that the ministry was in essence facilitating the 'indiscipline' in the industrial relations system, according to a JEF official speaking with the Financial Gleaner.
It was once, the federation said, an industrial relations 'norm' for striking workings to go back on the job as a condition to the ministry's intervention in disputes.
"The ministry has the responsibility to bring order," said the JEF insider. "It is the referee; (but) it now seems the ministry is conducting talks when people are still at loggerheads."
But yesterday, the ministry dismissed that charge, suggesting there might be confusion about the process.
"That first meeting is to work out that 'back to work formula," said Cheryl Smith, the ministry's head of public relations.
A more detailed response from the ministry did not arrive by press time.
A series of strikes and industrial action have been staged by mostly public sector workers, who stay away from work to press a cash-strapped government and its agencies into offering better wage packages.
Of the 227 cases that went before the ministry last year, 107 were resolved, while 12 petered out, said Smith.
Those figures do not include the more recent actions by National Water Commission workers, the police, and nurses.
In fact, the latest action was a four-hour strike at the central bank just week by workers represented by the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, which has affiliations with the opposition Jamaica Labour Party.
That action was particularly upsetting to the JEF, which said the action was premature and unexpected when a 'seasoned negotiator' like Rudyard Spencer, BITU president, was leading talks.
Government has a deal with an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 public workers to accept wage increases of an average 20 per cent under a new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU2), but three groups - rank and file police, teachers and nurses - have been holding out for more, saying the current offers were insufficient to offset cost of living expenses.
The BITU has also refused to sign MoU2, an agreement that restricts the deals Government can make with other groups for increased wages, unless it is prepared to give similar concessions to the MoU2 signatories.
The JEF, in a statement Tuesday, charged that the strike at the Bank of Jamaica was not to highlight a lack of consideration by the central bank, as the union claimed, but was more a muscle-flexing technique.
"We believe that what this has highlighted is the determination by some of our union officials to intimidate employers during the collective bargaining process," it said.
Suggesting however that those techniques belonged in the past, Baker said Wednesday that no longer could industrial relations be practiced as a case of "we versus them; it is about us."
