OSWALD BROWN

Writes...

There is one very good reason why the Bahamas Hotel Maintenance and Allied Workers Union (BHMAWU) and the Bahamas Hotel Catering and Allied Workers Union (BHCAWU) are engaged in a heated dispute over which one of them should represent the non-managerial workers at Sandals Royal Bahamian Resort. That reason is money.

For years, the BHCAWU, thanks to a 1979 amendment to the Industrial Relations Act, has been a cash cow, arguably the richest union in this country.

The amendment gave the union the right to establish an "agency shop" in hotels throughout the country, once it had gained the support of more than 50 percent of the employees of a hotel.

The establishment of an agency shop empowered the BHCAWU to have a set amount deducted as dues, not only from the salaries of its members, but all employees.

In the case of union members, the current dues is $10 a week, and non-members are required to pay 90 percent of that, which means they must pay $9 a week, whether they want to or not.

Leaders of the union justify the requirement that non-members pay dues by claiming that whenever they negotiate better working conditions or salary increases for their members, all of the employees benefit.

Even without the more than 1,200 Royal Oasis employees in Freeport, Grand Bahama, who became unemployed when that resort closed after damages suffered from two devastating hurricanes in 2004, estimates are that there are 6,000 dues-paying members of the BHCAWU.

Even if we use the smaller figure of $9 per week, simple mathematics tells us that the BHCAWU pulls in well in excess of $54,000 a week in workers dues. Calculate that over a period of one year, and you will get a good idea as to the type of money leaders of the BHCAWU have at their disposal.

There is something inherently wrong with this system that has always bothered me. Non-union members most certainly must not like the idea of being forced to make weekly contributions to the BHCAWU, or any other union for that matter which benefits from the "agency shop" arrangement.

It quite possibly is just as objectionable to BHCAWU members who have difficulty making ends meet that the union automatically gets $10 out of their salary whether they work a full week or not.

But there was no organized protest from employees at any hotel property in the country until workers at Sandals decided that they did not want to be represented by the BHCAWU.

There is a body of opinion that it was not by coincidence that their decision came after the ouster of Pat Bain as president of the BHCAWU and several of his top executives in elections held earlier this year.

Bain had been president of the BHCAWU for six years, with a base salary reported to be in six figures. Before becoming president in 2000, he had been a top executive member of the union for a number of years, serving for many of those years as the right-hand-man for Dr. Thomas Bastian, who was mostly responsible for building up the union's huge financial reserves during his 18-year tenure as president.

Articulate and well schooled in all aspects of trade unionism, Bain decided he was tired of playing second fiddle to Dr. Bastian and successfully engineered his ouster in 2000.

No doubt because of the high salaries the union pays its executive, he and his top executive members found themselves facing a strong challenge in the elections held earlier this year, and although he ended up in a tie for the presidency with Roy Colebrooke, most of his other executives were defeated.

It is still not clear whether all the legal matters have been settled with regard to who actually won the presidency, but Colebrooke has been functioning in that capacity for the past several months.

It is against this backdrop that the Sandals workers organized themselves into a union, the BHMAWU, and retained veteran trade union leader Obie Ferguson as their advisor.

Ferguson is president of the Trade Union Congress, an umbrella organization with a number of affiliated members.

He is also very politically ambitious, which may account for the fact that – with a general election only months away and possibly entertaining thoughts of offering himself as a candidate – he has been very active recently serving as advisor to various groups engaged in labour unrest.

With the Sandals workers, he appears to have been dealt a winning hand. Although officials of Sandals reportedly have joined forces with the Bahamas Hotel Catering and Allied Workers Union to block Ferguson's bid to establish the BHMAWU as the union of record for that resort, the consensus is that Ferguson will win this battle. He would have already done so by now if a poll planned for November 7 for workers to determine which union they want to represent them had been held.

No doubt convinced that Ferguson had the support of the majority of the Sandals workers, the BHCAWU – reportedly with the support of officials of Sandals – filed an injunction to restrain the Ministry of Labour from conducting the poll and requested a judicial review, supposedly based on the claim that it is the only union that is legally empowered to represent hotel workers.

Surely, there has to be something wrong with a union taking such extraordinary steps to force workers who do not want to be represented by them to become members.

Why should they have $10 a week mandatorily deducted from their salaries to support an organization that virtually abandoned the unemployed Royal Oasis workers in their time of need who had religiously paid dues to the union.

There were times during the slow period when some of them only worked one or two days, but the union got its $10 dues off the top.

The sad fact is that there is no guarantee the union being supported by Ferguson would treat them any differently, but they should not be denied the right to select the union of their choice to represent them.

Oswald T. Brown is editor and general manager of The Freeport News. Comments on this column can be sent to androsboy@hotmail.com.