De Castro slams Labour Minister for trade union comment
De Castro was speaking on his monthly programme Straight Talk, heard last night April 8, 2015 on ZBVI 780 AM.
The Minister had been speaking at the launch of the Ministry of Education and Culture’s apprenticeship job fair held at Maria’s By The Sea on March 30, 2015.
However, de Castro, known for speaking about labour unions, did not let the Minister’s statement pass unnoticed.
“For an individual who is sitting pretty and who is well secured to say that the territory is blessed because it doesn’t have labour unions is a disgrace, shameful, unacceptable and a complete insult to the intelligence of the workers of this territory,” said de Castro.
“Here in this territory there are so many people in the labour force and there are so many issues. The Labour Department can’t deal with them…and you know their track record,” he said.
“And people have been judging unions in many bad ways and sometimes for good reason. In the early years when unions were formed, they were a big help to the working man and they made a lot of progress. They improved conditions in the workforce…in the workplace. They created benefits and bargaining units,” he said.
He said that there are so many things as unions did in so many ways but as the years went by, like so many other things, the leaders of unions got corrupted.
“This happened all over the world, including the Caribbean,” he said. He noted too that in the early days everything was solved by strike action.
“Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that unions like to strike. That is not true anymore,” said de Castro.
This news site tried to reach Dr The Honourable Kedrick D. Pickering for a comment as to what exactly he meant by his statement on the trade unions but to no avail up to post time.
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9 Responses to “De Castro slams Labour Minister for trade union comment”
My personal opinion is that here is just too small... if something happens in Seventh Day Adventist School (for EXAMPLE) and a teacher feels they are being treated unfairly,...There aren't enough Private School Teachers that would be a part of the labour union to strike or speak out on behalf of the one or two teachers in SDA. (Maybe there are enough but then the other problem would be that the BVI is too small and too personal for persons to get involved in this type of civil action or civil disobedience.) We have to find a smaller, quicker ways to seek justice for employees and the Government has made efforts to do so. (Tribunal system etc...)