Yesterday, the Belize City Council's contract with Belize Maintenance Limited, which Mayor Darrell Bradley did not approve of, officially expired. This means that the sanitation company will no longer be in charge of cleaning up the city.
It also marked the day when 158 of BML's sanitation staff joined City Hall as full time employees with security of tenure and job security. As we showed you 2 weeks ago, Mayor Darrell Bradley announced that he and the council would work absorb the employees, instead of resisting it, as he had been doing.
Today, those new City Hall employees participated in an all-day orientation in which they met with Bradley and other key members of the council in which they discussed their rights and obligations, given that they are to be treated as full members of staff.
We caught up with the Mayor shortly after he gave his welcome address to the gathering. He told us that emphasis is being placed on treating all 158 persons as important and welcomed additions to the City Council Staff:
Darrell Bradley, Mayor - Belize City
"I've been meeting with the unions and we have been working very close with our management to ensure that there is seamless transition. The contract came to an end of the 15th January which was yesterday and this morning was the first official day that they have been in the employment of the City Council. What we've been doing since the start of the year was to ensure that everyone has a police report, everyone did medical report and that we have all the issues in terms of the employment file - everything has been complete. This morning at 8:30 we commence an all-day orientation session. I was part of the opening ceremonies which was from 8:30am to 9:00am, and I gave remarks to members of the BML staff, just to welcome them officially into the fold on the City Council. It's 158 people. We want them to feel supported and encourage and for them to be given every facility to do an excellent job and for the remainder of the day, they will be introduce to the management structure. We are going to talk to them about the municipal services regulation. We are going to talk to them specifically about the code of conduct that's in there and what is expected of them and the bulk of the afternoon session will be, in terms of explaining to them how the organizational structure works and their work cycles. We expect and I've been having regular meetings with the general secretary of the Christian Workers Union, Mr. Floyd Neal. He's been very supportive. The other union staff have been very supportive. We have introduce them this morning to Ms. Stephanie Gongora, who is the union representative for the CWU at City Council and we are encouraging them to use the union because I think that they have work very well with us in this transition."
"We expect that we are going to have difficulties. I told our senior leadership and the union that for the coming month, expect hiccups. But we are working on a transition. Everything seems to be going well. As their employer, I am accountable to the 67,000 residents of Belize City and sometimes we can be very management oriented in terms of how we are transitioning and what the union is there for is to represent the interest of the workers, so that they are protected by that stem and we have invited them and I think that our commitment is to ensure that they are treated fairly. But even if they are not assured by my verbal commitment to them, they have their union representative, so that this morning, we introduced to them Ms. Gongora. We invited them to go and see her if they had any specific problems that they didn't want to tell our management persons. Mr. Floyd Neal was there as well, he is going to be there for all day."
According to Bradley, as with any other place of employment, each new worker has a probation period, which will last for 6 months. At that time, each of the 158 employees will be assessed to ensure that they are performing up to the standards required to justify their continued employment. The mayor assures us that this evaluation will be completely transparent, and the Christian Workers Union will be invited in to oversee that each employee is assessed in a fair manner, given that they are also members of the CWU now.
The Mayor told us that his chief concern as to the sustainability of these new staffers is the wage bill that City Hall has to pay.
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