And the PM also responded to Shyne's concern about the retroactive supplementary budget.
He says now that the shoe is on the other foot - the government is practicing the opposite of what it preached.
But the PM says that there are extenuating circumstances; he says it was necessary to ensure that the stevedores got their money. More than that, though, the money was an instrumental part of the negotiations, which was one of the only reasons the stevedores ended their strike. Here's how Briceno put it:
Hon. John Briceno, Prime Minister
"He wants to have his cake and eat, he supports us giving the money to the stevedores but doesn't support us bringing an appropriation bill. We have to bring an appropriation bill to make it legal. What happened at that very moment is that, we were in a crisis. The port was shut down, ships were turning back and they were not taking the goods off the ship so we were soon going to be running out of food items, medicines, and many other things. Apart from that businesses who have already been struggling were losing business because they can't get their products, and even government was losing a lot of money in taxes that we have collected. And we have been in constant communication with the stevedores and the CWU to talk about the issues that have a direct impact on them and we do realize and accept that it seems like they have certain understandings of what it is that was going to happen after the privatization and it seemed that that never happened so we felt that it was time to take that off the table and to get them back to work, to get them to change some of the rules of work because some of the rules that they have of work is archaic. I mean when one group of stevedores would unload a ship, they would work for 15 hours and if they don't finish the ship they will go home and rest, rightly so, but nobody else could touch the ship. I mean in today's business of a 24 hour cycle, we can't leave a ship just waiting there until they rest and come back. They have agreed to sign on to a 12 hour shift and when they go home and rest a next group of stevedores, from the union, will go a finish the union. So a number of things, including social security, because they do not work everyday, they only work when it's time to offload the ships, they're not covered under social security so that's another matter, we said well okay we're prepared to sit down with social security and make the necessary amendments so that their employer and them can pay for social security coverage."
"And so with the stevedores in this instance, we felt in the negotiations with them that by putting that 1.5 million dollars on the table, we could address so many issues and we could be able to keep up within the time frame, we said we were going to pay it before the end of the month, you all have the MOU and so we have to get it in time and unfortunately we could not come to the House before we made that payment so the first house meeting we had, we brought the supplementary bill, which is what we did today."
