Member of Parliament for St George North and general secretary of the Barbados Workers’ Union (BWU) Toni Moore has urged fellow lawmakers to revisit several recommendations that were not incorporated into the Protection of Wages Bill, arguing they remain essential to ensuring workers are properly protected.
Moore stated her position in the House of Assembly on Tuesday during the debate on the bill introduced by Minister of Labour Colin Jordan.
The test of the legislation goes beyond modernisation to ensure it protects workers in real, practical ways and is effectively enforced, she said, pointing to a recommendation to close loopholes in the rules on the payment of wages.
She said: “Recommendation that was made for the tightening of the language to ensure that wages are paid on time on a normal working day and no later than the established payday… Because we have had employers that would force the payment of wages into the weekend when banks are closed
“And a worker who has given up their labour for an entire week has to wait through Saturday, Sunday, not being able to put the food on the table, and has to wait until Monday and has to turn around and beg for time to go and get money.”
Moore welcomed provisions allowing employers to make deductions for credit union payments, insurance or loan repayments once workers give written authorisation, noting that some employers have been refusing such requests.
“I want to suggest that where this is done, it creates hardship, it creates hardship for those workers who cannot access mortgages unless their employer agrees that they will make the deduction. Creates hardship for workers who cannot maintain credit union commitments or insurance commitments because sometimes the employer who has started to make the deductions decides somewhere midstream that they are no longer doing it, and workers are being pushed into financial instability, therefore, through no fault of their own.”
But, expressing concern about the recovery of wage overpayments, she criticised Section 14 of the bill for allowing employers to recover overpayments without a time limit.
“The bill allows employers to recover overpaid wages from any future wages, but it does not impose a time limit. As it is written, what that suggests to me, and I’m not a lawyer… [is] that an employer could recover an overpayment five years down the road, ten years down the road, or 15 years later. As one who functions as a worker representative and who also functions as an agent of the employer, I find this to be unreasonable.”
She explained that this is a burden on employees who plan their lives around their wages: “They should not be expected to absorb a deduction that happened years and years and years before, especially when an employer’s own payroll system may have caused the error.”
Using former Berger Paints workers as an example, she questioned how many workers may have been underpaid due to payroll errors.
Moore suggested a clear statutory timeframe for the recovery of funds:
“The suggestion could be 12 months. It could be 6 months, but a time frame nonetheless, because in leaving it open-ended, it means that an employer can come back at any point in time and impose deductions for overpayments. This was not accepted, but I sincerely [am] of the view that it needs to be revisited.”
The BWU head also argued that wages should be paid immediately upon termination of employment, particularly in cases of summary dismissal:
“In those cases, I believe that payment should be made when the NIS termination certificate is issued unless otherwise agreed between the employer and the employee at that point. I believe that it is important, if a relationship is ended, to be clean in these matters and not to have payments pending.”
She added: “Likewise, I appreciate that systems, payroll systems, may not allow for certain things, but in my experience, there are cases where you can do things manually; there are cases where you can override the system to allow for what I believe is immediate justice to be met. You don’t want me no more, you’re firing me, pay me everything and let me go on with my business one time.”
Moore also noted that Section 29 excludes workers employed under agreements of cooperation, warning that the provision could be abused through the misclassification of workers, particularly those in informal or gig economy arrangements.
She also renewed calls for wider reforms to the Employment Rights Act, saying inconsistent tribunal procedures, limitations on compensation awards and difficulties enforcing tribunal decisions continue to undermine workers’ access to justice.
“For instance, the act, the Employment Rights Act, allows the tribunal to set its own rules, and we may well recall how this became problematic because there was one case in which the chairman adopted Supreme Court rules, making a process that was supposed to offer workers a more seamless avenue towards justice, more litigious.”
There are still no clear, consistent tribunal rules, she suggested, which leads to inconsistent expectations, procedures and different requirements depending on the panel.
“This must be addressed. Workers deserve predictability.”
Moore also raised concerns about what she described as a misinterpretation of the Minimum Wages Act by a company she identified only by the acronym “BEC”, arguing that it was treating commissions as part of the minimum wage rather than paying the statutory minimum as a basic wage.
“In other words, the minimum wage is $10.71, and that company is saying it’s okay for us to pay a basic wage of $9 and the rest of it is made up by commissions.”
She suggested that this practice limits workers’ ability to qualify for mortgages and loans and said the matter has been before the Labour Department for almost a year.
The BWU head stressed, however, that to ensure proper enforcement of these laws, the Employment Rights Act needs to be reformed and the Labour Department requires adequate staff and resources:
“Adequately resourced, and I made the distinction between staffing and resourcing because headcount is not the same thing as resourcing, because if you have not enough people. And they’re not able to deliver. No indictment on who’s here, of course, but making the point, we must have the adequate resources to ensure that there’s the education that is needed for these laws to make sense to the public, whether you’re an employer or employee, and that there is enforcement of the pieces of legislation.”
Moore stressed the need for workers and employers to be educated, maintaining that this is essential for the legislation to be effective.
She said that while she supports the bill as a significant improvement, it still requires refinement and pledged to continue advocating for stronger labour legislation.
“We don’t expect perfection, so we will not stop it, but what we expect is that we will continue to work at it, to improve on it, to make sure it delivers in very practical ways to the people on whose behalf all of us in here commit to serve.”
(LG)
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