'Stop playing games'
Published:Thursday | August 5, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Gary Spaulding, Senior Gleaner Writer
The leadership of negotiating organisations and bargaining units have dispatched a stern warning to the Bruce Golding administration not to dish out its usual menu of delaying tactics to avoid paying public-sector workers what is due to them.
The warning came in the aftermath of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that the Government must honour a seven per cent increase to police personnel in the Island Special Constabulary Force (ISCF), emerging from the state's agreement with public-sector employees.
Many of the bargaining groups had maintained that the agreement signed between them and the Government on behalf of the thousands of public-sector workers was binding but it was the ISCF which tested it in the court.
Yesterday, Nurses' Association of Jamaica (NAJ) President Edith Allwood-Anderson hailed Tuesday's ruling of the Supreme Court but predicted the Government would try to duck its responsibility to the workers, as it had done with an Industrial Disputes Tribunal (IDT) ruling in favour of the nurses.
"The Government is playing a game that will backfire. I don't know, I don't know how, but I know that it will backfire," the forthright nurses leader declared.
"Legally and constitutionally instituted bodies have ruled and they are trying to play around with the rulings," she said in reference to decisions of the IDT and the Supreme Court.
No timeline given
President of the Jamaica Civil Service Association, Wayne Jones, noted that the court has not ruled on manner or timeline for payment of the seven per cent increase, but said, "Hopefully, we will not have to be driven into the courts for the how and when."
The Government has continued to maintain that it does not have the more than $8 billion required to pay the workers.
Arthur Williams, state minister in the Ministry of Finance with responsibility for the public sector, said yesterday that the court ruling was not as earth-shattering as it has been made out to be, as the Government had accepted that the money was owed.
Late in the day, however, word surfaced that the Government and its legal team had retreated to a meeting.
Chairman of the Police Federa-tion, Sergeant Raymond Wilson, who has been embroiled in a bitter dispute with some of the federation's executive members over his handling of the wage negotiations, seemed uncertain when The Gleaner contacted him repeatedly yesterday.
Up to late in the afternoon, the usually outspoken Wilson had nothing to say and kept asking The Gleaner to call him back.
But Allwood-Anderson had no such inhibition.
"Right now we are moving and we are not letting up," she told The Gleaner, following an extraordinary meeting she had convened with members of the NAJ.
Allwood-Anderson warned that the nurses would be making a clear statement between August 9 and 15.
The NAJ was among several bargaining units that rushed into meetings with their legal teams yesterday as news spread that the ISCF had prevailed over the Government in its legal row.