Over the weekend, the NTUCB celebrated its 60th anniversary with the launch of a documentary. According to the president, Ella Waight, it wasn't easy gathering documentary materials detailing the history of the union, but in the end, they received enough assistance to produce the doc. She explained more on Saturday.
Ella Waight, President, NTUCB
"We had major difficulties. We have some documents in our office from decades ago, but they're simply letters, finance information. There's no history recorded on those documents and so we had to reach out to the different affiliates asking them for their pictures, footage. We reached out to media houses who were willing to assist to help us with any footage they would have of any activities union-related. We got some. We had some pictures in our office that we used. Thankfully, we had historians in Belize that assisted us as well with information, and we also had a book written a few years ago that had some information as well. So, we compiled everything, we got someone that was willing to create the documentary for us, and we think it's a success. It allows us now to have a beginning of some place we can go to for this information. It took us 60 years to get here to document, but it's a start, and we hope that it can be continued throughout the life of the congress."
"It does get you emotional because this is something for me, not just a job, it's a passion. It's something that when I got elected as president, it was one of my objectives to not let this labor movement die. It's sad because when we look around, most of the people involved in labor movements are over the age of 35. We don't have a lot of young people. Like I mentioned in the documentary, in 2025, December 2025 when we had our AGM, we ensured that we amended our constitution to have a youth arm of the NTUCB. We now have a youth director, but I know the struggles he's having to get young people involved in the movement. It's either because they don't know the history of the movement, don't appreciate what this movement has done for them, what it can do for them, and if this movement dies, it will be a very sad day in this country if we don't have labor unions in this country. It will be a tragic day because then, if you think things are bad in this country, then we will see what is really bad. So, it does get me a bit emotional to see persons like Sister Kathleen, persons like Sister Sharon here, our senator here. It does open my heart that we do have person that are still willing to ensure the NTUCB succeeds."
