They lied to their former employees and it turns out they lied to us as well when City Hall administrators said that severance monies had been deposited into various accounts of city council workers. Today the Belize City Council admitted that employees have not been fully compensated after being terminated at the end of the month.
A release from the City Council today says that they will be unable to meet the Friday September 3rd commitment made to the 220 employees. But with the workers, money matters and today they again angrily clamored for what's theirs in front of City Hall.
Worker #1,
“You this shirt here? We are at SEL!”
Jules Vasquez,
Explain how this is affecting you in terms of having no money.
Worker #1,
“We are working a next company without no money and tomorrow is payday and we are getting paid.”
Jules Vasquez,
SEL is not paying you?
Worker #1,
“No SEL is not paying us tomorrow until next week.”
Jules Vasquez,
So school is starting and you all did not get paid. How is this affecting you?
Worker #1,
“It’s affecting all of us bad right now.”
Worker #2,
“We need money to send our kids to school on Monday. I can’t even buy anything because I have no money.”
Jules Vasquez,
How you feel that they are treating you all like this?
Worker #2,
“I feel bad.”
Worker #1,
“You what they are doing with us? They are acting like we don’t have common sense, like we can’t read and write. We went to school.”
Worker #3,
“We got things from Courts and Courts will come and take back their things. We have to pay our bills. We need our money.”
Worker #1,
“No supervisor has gotten authorization that money is coming. Nobody has gotten money. What is going on with our money? Do we look like dumb dumb people or what?”
Worker #4,
“All I want to tell these people is to stop turning us around because we are adults and we have our families to feed and we don’t want them to punk us. We can’t take this anymore. Now they sent us to SEL, they sell we out. They sell we out because they are abstracting us.”
Jules Vasquez,
And SEL won’t pay you this week?
Worker #4,
“Now they haven’t said anything about paying us so we want to know what will be the outcome that is why we are out here right now.”
To come out and protest these former city council employees, now SEL workers took the afternoon off from their private companies to come out. There is a meeting scheduled for tomorrow between the Mayor David Fonseca along with the Christian Workers Union, the union that represents the majority of the employees.