Nadaleen Singh

Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU), John Julien is call­ing on the man­age­ment of Hilton Ho­tel and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre to re­scind its de­ci­sion to is­sue 50 let­ters fir­ing part-time staff. The call was made at a news con­fer­ence held out­side of the ho­tel's com­pound, off La­dy Young Road, St Ann's yes­ter­day.Julien' said the work­ers re­ceived let­ters on Car­ni­val Tues­day no­ti­fy­ing them of their ter­mi­na­tion of em­ploy­ment ef­fec­tive March 6."The com­pa­ny thought it fit on Car­ni­val Tues­day to get rid of these work­ers. As of to­day, for three months they would not be on a ros­ter. They would be home for the three months and af­ter the three months, they (the ho­tel man­age­ment) are go­ing to de­cide whether they are go­ing to ex­tend it (the leave) or not, that is a ter­mi­na­tion," Julien said.

De­spite claims by the CWU that the ho­tel's man­age­ment did not com­mu­ni­cate with the CWU be­fore ter­mi­nat­ing the work­ers, the union, on March 5, wrote to the man­age­ment of the ho­tel, de­mand­ing that the work­ers be re­in­stat­ed.Julien al­so said there was no ex­cuse for ter­mi­nat­ing the em­ploy­ees based on a low oc­cu­pan­cy rate. The union al­so stat­ed in its March 5 let­ter, that the de­ci­sion to ter­mi­nate the work­ers was "is in di­rect vi­o­la­tion of the pro­vi­sions of the Col­lec­tive Agree­ment Ar­ti­cle 4 (b). Julien is al­so de­mand­ing to get a list of all the part-time em­ploy­ees who were af­fect­ed as a re­sult of this ac­tion by the ho­tel's man­age­ment."

When con­tact­ed, the ho­tel's tele­phone op­er­a­tor stat­ed that no one was in of­fice to re­spond to the mat­ter and sug­gest­ed that at­tempts should be made to con­tact the of­fice to­day.