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Friday, July 3, 2009

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Hotel union's new leadership Nicole Martin's landslide victory in last week's Bahamas Hotel Catering and Allied Workers Union (BHCAWU) presidential race and the election of an entirely new slate of officers to run the union for the next three years brought to an end the most tumultuous period in the history of the BHCAWU. Under the presidency of Roy Colebrook, for more than two years an acrimonious internal dispute among the union's top executives made it virtually impossible for them to do the job they were elected to do: Look out for the welfare of the union's members, estimated at one time to be more than 7,000. Obviously, the fact that Colebrook finished dead last in the four-candidate race – with just 270 votes compared to Martin's 1,358 – underscored just how fed up union members eventually became with the poor leadership provided by the union over the past three years by himself, General Secretary Leo Douglas and Treasurer Basil McKenzie. Indeed, both Douglas and McKenzie were also soundly defeated. The three had run the union as if it were their personal little club, disregarding decisions made by the Executive Council. In fact, after eight members of the Executive Council voted to suspend them during the height of their ongoing warfare, Douglas was quoted in a news report as saying: "The Constitution clearly states that the president shall work in close collaboration with the general secretary and the treasurer, and those three people shall run the organization from day to day. Those persons who are claiming that we are suspended have no authority because the authority lies with the president, the general secretary and the treasurer." Clearly, attempting to run the BHCAWU in this manner is a pitfall that newly-elected president Martin should assiduously avoid. What's the sense of having an Executive Council if it does not have input into how the union is run? Although she is the first woman to be elected president of the BHCAWU, Martin is said to be an experienced trade unionist, and as such, she should be familiar with the history of the BHCAWU and the sterling leadership that it once had under the long-time presidency of Dr. Thomas Bastian and the late Pat Bain. It was under Dr. Bastian that the BHCAWU emerged as arguably the richest and most powerful union in the country. The basis for the union's considerable wealth was an amendment made to the Industrial Relations Act in 1979, which allowed the union to establish an "agency shop" at hotels in the country, once the majority of the employees of a hotel became union members. With an agency shop in place, union dues are automatically deducted from the salaries of all non-management hotel employees, whether they are union members or not; for union members, the dues are $10 a week, and non-members pay 90 percent of that. Meanwhile, with the cash cow guaranteed to them by their agency shop set-up, the union executives are paid grossly inflated salaries that place them among some of the best paid professionals in the country. Human nature being what it is, it is unlikely that Martin would move to reduce the financial remuneration paid to executives, but she can demonstrate that the welfare of the union members will be a top priority of her administration. One way of doing this is by changing what we consider to be an egregiously bad union policy. We have suggested in the past that it is grossly unfair for union members to lose their membership if they do not pay dues for three months through no fault of their own, as was the case with the more than 1,200 Royal Oasis employees in Freeport, Grand Bahama, who were left without jobs after two devastating hurricanes forced that resort to close in 2004. For many years, dues were deducted from the salaries of some of these employees, but after three months they were no longer considered to be union members because they had no jobs from which dues could have been deducted. The unfairness of this policy was compounded by the fact that they were unable to vote in the 2006 election to demonstrate to the then incumbent team seeking re-election that they abhorred the manner in which they were treated in the aftermath of the closure of the Royal Oasis resort. As it turned out, however, the late Pat Bain, who had been president of the BHCAWU for six years, was narrowly defeated by Colebrook in that election, although his sidekick, General Secretary Leo Douglas, was re-elected and eventually became Colebrook's right-hand man. Surely, this is one rule that newly-elected President Martin should look into changing. She should also follow another suggestion we made some time ago and place $2 a week out of dues collected from members into a special account to benefit members who become unemployed, in a manner similar to the unemployment benefits now being provided by the government to unemployed Bahamians. The bottom line is that with an entirely new executive team in place, Martin has a golden opportunity to provide the BHCAWU with good management for the next three years – something it certainly lacked during the past three years. Wednesday, June 3, 2009