President of the Barbados Employers’ Confederation (BEC), Marguerite Estwick.
There is a call for the issue of the culture of sick leave in Barbados, its impact on productivity, and its facilitators be placed on the Social Partnership agenda.
This comes from President of the Barbados Employers’ Confederation (BEC), Marguerite Estwick, as she indicated that research has shown that some people are abusing benefits negotiated in collective agreements and legislated in the NIS to provide assistance to the real sick, by using these benefits for other reasons.
“It is not enough that we study the reasons why people opt to abuse these benefits. It is imperative that we now look at all the mechanisms that facilitate these abuses and implement the required remedies.
“There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the current and long-term impact of this abuse is untenable. It will eventually collapse the safety net that was created to protect the real sick and vulnerable, or lead to a reduction in these benefits; it will also severely impact the island’s competitiveness,” she stressed.
“We register our concern today that the remedy cannot be to simply increase the NIS contributions.
The business sector understands that there are two elementary steps to a balanced budget – cash inflows and costs incurred.”
Estwick’s call came during the BEC’s 60th Anniversary Awards Ceremony and Dinner recently held at Apes Hill Country Club.
Recognising that the Social Partnership has come of age, Estwick believes meetings must be held at timely intervals with appropriate agendas that “address the urgent challenges before us, and with those government technocrats present as required to provide important inputs to the agenda”.
“The Social Partnership cannot simply become the stone fence at which we meet on some ad hoc timetable, and where each party walking his/her side of the fence, voicing his/her position, simply reinforcing the fence, only to walk away at the end of days of such discussions having achieved nothing,” she said. (TL)