Se­nior of­fi­cials at Ju­nior Sam­my Con­trac­tors Ltd have dis­missed re­ports that all per­ma­nent em­ploy­ees of the com­pa­ny were is­sued with fur­lough no­tices up to the end of Jan­u­ary, in­sist­ing the claim is “com­plete­ly un­true” and based on in­ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion.

Re­spond­ing to an ar­ti­cle pub­lished yes­ter­day, the com­pa­ny said no per­ma­nent work­er has been sent home, no one has been ter­mi­nat­ed, and no di­rec­tive was is­sued for staff to re­main off the job with­out pay in­to 2026.

A se­nior of­fi­cial told Guardian Me­dia last evening the re­port “made no sense,” not­ing that the com­pa­ny can­not func­tion if its en­tire per­ma­nent work­force of more than 200 peo­ple across its group of com­pa­nies was re­moved from du­ty.

The of­fi­cial said that op­er­a­tions con­tin­ue across all sites, and its staff is still on pay­roll.
The com­pa­ny ac­knowl­edged that, like all con­trac­tors in the coun­try, it is nav­i­gat­ing a wors­en­ing eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment and a slow­down that has af­fect­ed work sched­ules across the sec­tor. How­ev­er, the of­fi­cial stressed that the com­pa­ny has nev­er laid off staff in its decades of op­er­a­tion, even dur­ing pre­vi­ous down­turns.

In­stead, the com­pa­ny is im­ple­ment­ing a ro­ta­tion sys­tem to keep em­ploy­ment sta­ble, with some staff work­ing “one day in, one day out” while oth­ers re­main per­ma­nent as the in­dus­try con­tracts. The of­fi­cial said work­ers will con­tin­ue to re­ceive their pay up to mid-De­cem­ber, when the com­pa­ny typ­i­cal­ly clos­es op­er­a­tions for the sea­son, which is stan­dard prac­tice across the con­struc­tion sec­tor. Em­ploy­ees work­ing longer in­to the month will be paid their full month’s salary.

The com­pa­ny main­tained that em­ploy­ees were spo­ken to in­di­vid­u­al­ly and were aware that slow­down of work this month is a tem­po­rary two-week mea­sure and ro­ta­tion of some em­ploy­ees would be­gin in Jan­u­ary.

The of­fi­cial not­ed the pub­li­ca­tion in­cor­rect­ly framed the slow­down as an ex­clu­sive Ju­nior Sam­my is­sue, when mul­ti­ple ma­jor con­trac­tors have al­ready un­der­tak­en sim­i­lar steps due to the econ­o­my.

The of­fi­cial added that Ju­nior Sam­my Con­trac­tors is do­ing every­thing pos­si­ble to pre­serve jobs, even as the sec­tor faces con­di­tions com­pa­ra­ble to the mid-1980s.

De­spite the fi­nan­cial strain and out­stand­ing pay­ments owed to con­trac­tors across the in­dus­try, the com­pa­ny em­pha­sised that it re­mains com­mit­ted to keep­ing its work­force in­tact.

—An­drea Perez-Sobers