Belize celebrates Labor Day on Friday, May 1, but even as the contribution of workers will be celebrated across the Jewel, there are major unresolved labor issues. This week Amandala received a complaint from a worker in Southern Belize, alleging that employers are shortchanging them their holiday benefits. (That story demands further investigation.)
But the case that today stands out as the most extraordinary, when it comes to the battle between workers and employers, is that which is being fought inside the courtroom between Christine Perriott and her former employer, the multi-million-dollar enterprise, Belize Telemedia Limited (BTL), then Belize Telecommunications Ltd, controlled by British billionaire Michael Ashcroft.
As we write, Perriott’s family possessions have been “crow-footed” by the court to satisfy an order of the court to pay BTL $24,000 in costs, because, according to Perriott, currently unemployed, BTL won’t accept payment in installments, but wants its money upfront.
BTL can afford and has hired the best lawyers, local and foreign, but Perriott, who was terminated earlier this year from the Belize City Council, does not have such means. BTL has succeeded in having her former lawyer, Lois Young, barred from her case, and now Perriott is being defended by human rights attorney, Antoinette Moore.
The legal battle has been a rollercoaster ride for Perriott, first celebrating victory in the lower court when she won an interim reinstatement order in the Supreme Court, only to have it overturned by the Court of Appeal later, and being faced now with a $24,000 bill in court costs that she has to pay BTL.
This evening when Perriott goes home, she will again watch with a mixture of consternation and conviction the markings that court officers had fixed on the items in her home, marked as items to be “crow-footed” as a part of the $24,000 award for costs to BTL – consternation because her family stands to lose what they have worked hard for and conviction because she realizes that her struggle is certainly not over.
“It’s like a reminder to keep fighting, to keep struggling…” says Perriott. “While those are things that you earn and you work for, and in time you gather those stuff, I could let go of those stuff for more a righteous cause, especially looking at my family – my sons, my daughter, their children. I believe that their future and the rights that they need to have in the future is worth more than a refridge or a TV or material things,” said Perriott, describing those household effects as replaceable. “You go at it again.”
Perriott had dared to challenge BTL’s decision to terminate her, amid negotiations over the termination of three other BTL workers in January 2007. The Belize Communications Workers Union, of which Perriott was General Secretary, had threatened a strike, but because the Minister of Labor ordered a tribunal, the union had to rescind.
Still, even as we write, the tribunal appointed to investigate the terminations has not progressed and the stalemate in that dispute continues.
So why does she continue to fight the great giant, Michael Ashcroft’s BTL?
“I strongly believe that this is not only for me; this is for all workers. I still meet a lot of people going through the same thing that I go through …even if the government of the day does nothing for the workers, there is this case that they can take to court [as a precedent] …and get satisfaction for their rights being vindicated,” Perriott added.
“I still meet a lot of people who are experiencing the same things and there is no recourse.”
Perriott dates her personal struggle back to her schooldays at Belize Technical College. She was the only female student in the engineering department, for the 1986-1988 class. The prevailing mentality was that no woman could achieve that category of qualification, but Perriott said that this was her chosen field, and so she persisted despite the attempts to discourage her.
After graduation, she started looking for a job and she met the same resistance – “no women allowed here”. She recalled that on one occasion, one supervisor threatened to quit if she was hired to work under him. Perriott claims that the reason for the protest was merely the belief that she, as a woman, could not do the job that was termed “a man’s job.” When that was not the issue, it was sexual harassment, she said.
The management of BTL seemed to be more liberal, and in fact embraced her as an assistant technician in the business systems department in 1990, Perriott recounted. She did 11 years in that department until she was transferred to switching.
She said that it was not until 2003 that she became active in the union, at the time when it was coming out of a long period of dormancy. She said that she realized that the union could play a vital role in protecting the rights of workers and even though they had their internal problems, workers were starting to realize that if they banded together, they could have greater bargaining power to achieve their ends.
It is ironic that shortly after the union reached its peak performance, during the spate of protests of 2005, leading up to the terminations of January 2007, it has again returned to a period of dormancy.
Perriott has, since she decided to challenge her termination in the courts, been going at it alone, even though she was one of the most visible union activists in the years leading up to her termination and a lead negotiator for the union up to that point.
She tells Amandala that it was not easy being a part of the struggle, including the period when BTL changed ownership from Government to Michael Ashcroft to Government to Prosser, and then to Government and then back to Ashcroft.
Even though Perriott resigned from BTL at the end of 2007, she said that she will continue with the court case.
She said that the union wanted Belizeans to have a say in BTL and to retain ownership along with the union in BTL, but they lost that fight to Ashcroft.
It became a David versus Goliath duel to Perriott:
“My reason for taking that case to court is that there are laws that are made to protect people’s rights. The Trade Union Act, the Constitution, the Government, the Ministry of Labor [are supposed to protect workers]. But when things happened to us as workers, at that time the elected people in authority did nothing. They just sat there and watched us get whipped. I believe that there just had to be some recourse in some way and something had to change,” she added.
She felt that because they got no help from Government, she had to seek an audience in the courts, and she believes that it is the very court that will declare her victory in the end, despite the fact that she stands to lose the household effects she claims are the joint property of her and her husband, former union president, Paul Perriott.
Perriott says that for her birthday on January 6, she got a notice as a formal notification that she owes BTL $24,000.
And the markings on her and her husband’s household effects still present today are reminder for her that the fight, two years after it began, is still not over.