The physical conditions that obtain on premises housing government ministries and other state-run departments will come under closer scrutiny as part of a broader initiative being undertaken by the Ministry of Social Protection to bring workplaces in line with national safety and health requirements, Minister in that Ministry Simona Broomes has told the Stabroek Business.
Having attracted considerable public attention for her robust pronouncements on the need for employers to be in compliance with the law in a range of areas, including those of safety and health in the workplace, Broomes told Stabroek Business in an interview on Tuesday that she had dispatched a letter to ministers and permanent secretaries reminding them of their ministries’ obligations under the law and requesting that they establish Occupa-tional Safety and Health (OSH) committees in their ministries.
It is widely believed that few if any government ministries currently have such committees and the minister said that programmes currently being run by her ministry could address training for employees identified to sit on OSH committees. “Our concern is with significantly raising the level of awareness of the importance of safety and health at the workplace,” Broomes said, adding that the Social Protection Ministry is contemplating a competition among state agencies to coincide with OSH month in April next year.
Meanwhile, Broomes said that the uncharacteristically assertive approach to enforcing the laws pertaining to workers that has coincided with her assumption to office is really no more than what she believes President David Granger would expect of her. She said she believed the problem in the past had to do with the reluctance of the previous administration to enforce the law rigorously.
“What I have found in some of the cases I have been investigating are clear cases of worker exploitation. The law is clear on employers’ obligations to employees. You owe an employee and that employee should not be made to wait or to accept what he is owed in pieces. Ordinary employees cannot be expected to wait,” she said.
Broomes was commenting on a question raised by this newspaper on her preferred approach of engaging employers directly and trying to negotiate what she describes as ‘tough but fair” deals with them for the payment of what in many instances are long-outstanding terminal and other benefits. “You owe someone a few hundred thousand and you pay him five or ten thousand dollars as and when you please and what do you expect him to do with that money? How do you expect him to put it to good use?”
In recent weeks Broomes has negotiated several arrangements that have resulted in terminated employees receiving the full amounts of their terminal benefits while, she said, others can anticipate receiving theirs in the near future. “I’m doing nothing special. I am simply following the laws. I did not write the laws,” she said.
Meanwhile, Broomes is rejecting the notion that the problems on employer/ employee relations arise purely out of insensitive employers. She insists that most employers will probably comply once they get a sense that government is serious about its reinforcement, without fear or favour.
