So while the future of the cruise industry remains uncertain at this time, what about the government owned Port of Belize? As you saw earlier this week, the stevedores refused to offload cargo ships to send a message to the government regarding their redundancy package.
They're meeting with GOB on Monday and they expect a suitable settlement offer. But today the PM maintained that there was no redundancy. He also added that the issues preventing them from signing an agreement are "minor" ones.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"I've had several meetings with the stevedores and every time we meet we come with an agreement but it seems when they leave the meeting, they come up with other issues. I said to them from the beginning, let's not talk about sugar, or the sugar money, I said you have your position, we have our position that there is no claim for no kind of redundancy, nobody got fired so there's no sugar money. But as a government we're prepared to be able to adjust many of the pending issues between the stevedores and the Port of Belize so that we can modernize the Port. The way the Port has been running for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years, it's not in the interest of the Port nor the interest of the country and I've been explaining to the stevedores, now we have competition, there's more than one port. So when you decide that you don't want to discharge a ship, the ship would either a, go back to their home country, quite likely the United States, or they go down south to discharge their ship, their containers, that's what happened with sugar. so when they behave the way they do, they decided not to offload, they are shooting themselves in the foot. We need to be able to find a common ground where we both, stevedores, Port of Belize, and the Government of Belize, that we want to find out how to move this forward, how we can modernize, and at the same time to protect their interest. I understand that, and we want to do that, that is why the government made an offer of 1.5 million dollars to say listen, let's stop fighting about everything, let's come up with the new working practices, can't work more than fifteen hours, and when you finish working fifteen hours, a new gang finishes if the ship is not finished offloading. Let's look at the number of gangs, Port wanted to bring it down to 12, it's 14, and the stevedores didn't want to accept that. I said, okay, in the CBA you've already signed, you're talking about 13, okay let's see with 13, so we've agreed with that. So most of the things we've agreed, there's just small little things. For instance, how many people are going to be working in discharging for instance, when we have fertilizers but these are small things that can be worked out."
"We will meet with them on Monday once again but this is not my money, I just can't give them the money, we have to have an agreement. When we have an agreement, then we're going to be passing on the money to the Christian Workers Union on their behalf."
