Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has warned employers against deducting sick days from workers who had to go into quarantine.
Employers who were made aware of any of their employees being patrons of the Boxing Day bus crawl, or had been in contact with persons who were, reported that those employees were tested and quarantined until cleared to return to work.
Mottley is therefore of the view that referring to that time off the job as “sick days” is highly unfair.
“I was told that some workers are being told that the period of time during quarantine is to be deducted from their sick days – I think that is highly unfair,” she told Barbadians on Monday night during the COVID-19 update.
“The workers, not in every instance, but in most instances, who were exposed were not exposed because of their being reckless, or their being somewhere they should not have been. In 95 per cent of the cases, it is because they were simply doing their job.
“In most instances, I must tell you that the majority by far of the tests have come back negative. So it means that yes, they have been forced to stay at home for the three, four, five days, whatever it is. But if you deduct that from their sick leave allocation, then when they really are ill and need it, especially at the start of this new calendar year – it is not going to be there for them,” the PM explained, calling on the Social Partnership to further investigate the matter.
“So I hope this is a matter that the Social Partnership can engage in, between the private sector, the Employers’ Confederation and the unions, to ensure that we can have clarity across the board with respect to it,” she said.