Fifty-one former employees of Pritipaul Singh Investment Inc. are demanding that the owner of the company keeps his promise to pay them their severance after he reportedly suggested they leave over an attempt to unionise and they have also accused the Ministry of Labour of dragging its feet on the case.
Stabroek News spoke with one of the employees, Nicola Smith, who noted that on September 20th, the owner of the company, Pritipaul Singh, had called a meeting with the workers where he notified them that he heard rumors that they were planning to establish a workers’ union and advised that he did not want any such body to be formed at his company and told those in favour of unionising to leave.
“…He said whoever want union can go to the gate and they’ll be paid off…the workers then proceeded to the HR where he (the HR) was instructed for us to submit our work badge and from there on they would’ve check-up how much years of service we have and come up with a declaration letter,” said Smith.
The woman said that although they had submitted their badges, the following day they went back to work as normal and five persons were locked out. “On the 21st September the workers went back to normal work and five were locked out then everybody join with the five that were locked out and due to the confusion they then give we dates on which day we gon pick up a letter that the company would issue to we and in that letter would have a date that we gon go and pick up we cheque.” She said that on the said date, 12 persons including the five that were locked out had been paid.
Smith added that during the second phase of payment, the company noted that they will pay ten persons per week and had also declared that they will not be paying persons from the sanitation department and the quality control department. She said due to such declaration, both departments started to protest, which resulted in the company deciding to cease all payments to former workers.
“What we did is after they said they stop the payment we asked them to give us a retroactive letter because we already sign off from working at the company but they refuse and it was then when we took the matter to labour. The company went to labour and said that they have work and so they expected we to show up back to work with no guarantee, no contract…nothing to say that we service wasn’t terminated, nothing of the sort and we don’t want it that way we want it in a written document but labour wasn’t doing anything about it.”
The woman said that it was only until they involved a lawyer that the ministry started to look into their welfare and ordered the company to stick to their agreement and pay the workers their severance. However, the company still paid no heed to the ministry’s directive and instead decided to send another letter to the workers, informing them that if they do not show up at work seven days after October 3rd then they would automatically terminate their employment from the company.
Smith further stated that even though the ministry now has a saying in the matter, she still feels that they are “dragging their foot on the matter” and that they can do a lot more for the workers.
Meanwhile, when this newspaper tried to contact the owner of the company, calls to his phone went unanswered.
