Dear Editor,
President Donald Trump announced to journalists at the White House that he would be considering compensating weekly paid workers for absence due to the requirement to avoid contact with the coronavirus by staying at home.
Compare this ‘initiative’ with the provision of paid sick leave so standard in local employment conditions.
Our women’s maternity leave of thirteen (13) weeks must be unheard of by most (new) foreigners (outside the CARICOM region).
Add to the foregoing, annual leave – ranging from two weeks to one month, with some managerial categories benefitting up to three months.
We are way ahead of Bernie Sanders, with our National Insurance Scheme, usually complemented by corporate contributory pension schemes, clearly distinctive from our national Old Age Pension Scheme.
But just don’t ask RUSAL about Collective Bargaining Agreement – a discouraging example for inhabitants of the new technological environment.
So that with the promised energising of new jobs, which agency will be assigned the specific responsibility for ensuring compliance by immigrant employers in the first instance, and to whom new delinquent domestic entities will refer as justification?
Anxious as our Private Sector Com-mission should be, surely its members should seek a reformed construct that would allow them to aggressively monitor the (mis)behaviours of the new competitors.
The malfunctioning agencies of Foreign Affairs and Labour would prefer not to blow their own Trumpets.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
