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Mose Hyde, President, CWU
"We are at a point where we cannot see ourselves working without the protection of a collective bargaining agreement and the fact is that we have a collective bargaining agreement that is almost complete. We have 2 outstanding issues remaining and those a disciplinary machinery and a grievance machinery which we don't envisioned to be problematic. We don't envision that those would be anything that could become a dispute. Obviously, you still have to sit down and commit yourselves and in fact from the Sunday evening we have indicated that we are willing to start hashing out those 2 issues Sunday evening. Coming out of the meeting with stevedores their consensus was strong. Listen, we don't mind the mediation and all the other things, but the CBA matter is one that is everything to us, we are committed to going to work under a CBA and so we responded, I think I have provided a copy of that email that we sent out to the folks at the emissary and to PBL and to the ministry saying, listen, the position is that our members say they want to have a CBA in place. We can do this and again we repeated in that email we are ready to begin tonight, because we feel that listen with some coffee and a little bit of stamina we can get through this in a very short period of time, meaning a 12 hour period."

This morning in a release of their own The Belize Chamber of Commerce called the disruption at the port a quote: "Gravely serious matter for the entire Belizean economy."

The release says, quote, "The Belizean economy is already fragile due to COVID-19 pandemic impact and the further damage caused by the business community's inability to rely on efficient and consistent port services from the country's primary port will make recovery much more difficult, putting jobs, investments and livelihoods at serious risk.

BCCI, therefore, encourages all relevant parties to exercise good faith by returning to the negotiating table..."