Waight also spoke about the Belize Energy Workers and their struggle to get their severance payments from BEL. Waight told us what they did when they found themselves in a similar situation.
Ella Waight, President NTUCB
"All affiliate unions understand the decision from the CCJ, they understand the clarification which is obviously that severance is different from pension and severance can be subsumed to replace severance. I can give you an instance where as an individual I knew of this issue happening some years ago because the same change came to the Social Security Board via the management at that time where they wanted to subsume our severance through the pension. And we were in our collective bargaining agreement. Severance is paid as per the labor law that is stated in our CBA. So when they brought up this change that they wanted to apply we went and we sought out legal advice. And the legal advice we got was it is totally different, do not allow that to happen. And thankfully the former chief at that time she had a legal document from 2 senior attorneys that they had from a decade before saying the same thing. Severance is different than pension and so we told them we have legal advice that it is different and we will not allow this to happen at SSB."
"Sending this letter to all of those unions ensures that someone somewhere must capture the importance of this letter and push our recommendations to the labor department."
