Company says they are just trying to make life easier for everybody

A group of employees who work for the largest beverage distributor in the country contacted us yesterday because they were discontented about what they called an “unfair” change in their terms of employment with their employer, Bowen and Bowen Ltd. – a change which the company says will actually bring benefits to the workers.

Two of the employees with whom we spoke claimed that they were being made to sign new contracts which seemed unreasonable to them, not only because it appeared to them that they would be doing more work and collecting the same pay, but also because they will no longer be eligible to get paid for public and bank holidays, while benefits that they have gotten previously were either being cut down drastically, or eliminated completely.

The workers – who wish to remain anonymous – mentioned that their understanding was that if they don’t comply and sign on to the new work contracts, they might soon be out of a job, so they consulted a labor union today to find out if the company was acting within the confines of the Labor Laws of Belize.

“The company is just making sudden changes with[out] notifying any of us, and when they brought the contracts to us, our manager just said, ‘it is what it is, you either take it or leave it’”, one worker stated.

According to the other employee, the company gave them a deadline – which ended today – for them to sign and hand in the new contracts.

He said, “The reason we have not yet signed the contracts is because we feel that we are being taken advantage of. If you are going to make changes to our working conditions, then you are supposed to tell us before, but we were not notified – they just brought the papers for us to sign at a meeting late last night. So, we got together and came to an agreement not to sign [the contracts].”

One of the issues that sparked the objections was a reduction in commission for cases of beverages that are sold, which the workers said dropped from 20 cents to 7 cents per case for drivers, while sidemen will now be getting 4 cents when they used to get 14 cents.

“I have to deliver 744 cases so I can receive the same $50 that I used to make on top of my regular pay. Now we have to work like 3 times harder than how we used to work to make that money. Then they look at us and they tell us that we are supervisors; if we are supervisors, then we should be getting supervisors’ allowances”, the unhappy worker told us.

Today, however, Amandala spoke with Ms. Christelle Wilson, the Public Relations Officer at Bowen and Bowen Ltd., who clarified that the workers may have misconstrued what was actually taking place at the company, that it was merely a restructuring exercise in which the status of their roles would be amended for better efficiency and improved customer services.

She said, “The company had put in place a pre-sell distribution system whereby we have 3 salesmen who go out and take orders from customers, after which the deliverymen take the goods to be delivered. The trucks used to go out and do everything and that used to be inefficient, so to improve our services, we now have the customers pre-order the goods.”

Wilson explained that it is untrue that the workers were being made to sign new contracts, and stated that their status will actually be upgraded to deliverymen with supervisory positions. “The forms the workers were given were simply for them to confirm those new positions”, she told us.

The claim that the workers will now work for unfair wages was also disputed by Wilson. She said that in fact, each worker got a 27 percent increase in their basic salary after an employment evaluation was done, and both the regular basic salary and overtime were averaged.

She maintained that the employees were not being given more work, but instead, they were being provided with structured work, since they are only delivering items that have already been pre-ordered.

Wilson said, “We have trained these workers for months about the new regulations and nobody said anything. We are simply trying to create promotional opportunities for our staff.”

The company’s public relations officer said that the company felt that they were doing something great for the workers because there were 13 positions that could have been declared redundant; however, no one was fired. She told us that the workers did not even wait to see what they would have been paid before coming to the media.

“We are not giving the workers more work; we are just trying to make life easier for everybody”, Wilson asserted.

She emphasized that nobody can force the workers to resign, and that they are being given ample time to decide what they want to do.

“We are looking forward to moving the company forward in a positive light with everybody on-board”, she concluded.

Wilson also thanked the sales staff and pre-sellers who came in to work and assisted on Tuesday when the group of disgruntled employees decided to protest and did not show up.