The Port of Belize is immobilized tonight - and no ship has been offloaded since Friday. This is a result of industrial action by stevedores who are showing up for their shifts - but refusing to offload ships. They are doing this as a reaction to the Government owned port failing to give them what they believe is a suitable settlement for redundancy. In a press conference with the union today the CWU president says that they are not on strike, she explains why.

Leonora Flowers, CWU President
"There had been a lot of frustration going around. Our members are at their wits end having a bunch of stevedores frustrated is not a good thing. The water front is never on alignment when stevedores are unhappy and this is what is happening right now our stevedores are not at all pleased with the status quo as it is at the moment. We know and we recognize the government's first priority last two weeks was the campaigning that has finished. The elections have come and gone it's almost a week and we are still waiting for a formal and decent response that will put us where our members can begin to feel comfortable once again. That's where we are."

"They know that when stevedores are on strike we send them a strike notice and we have issued no strike notice so as far as CWU is concerned there is no strike. We are not on strike."

And while there may not be a strike in the formal sense, the labor dispute has far wider implications for the country. The MV Aries arrived on Friday - and when the stevedores refused to work the ship - it went back out to safe anchorage with its 300 or so containers. The CWU claims that they have not been informed of anything in black and white

Leonora Flowers, CWU President
"They have been no formal response to us that shops have been sent away not from the interim board not from the government, not from anyone. No one told us that ships have been sent away."

"We have our people out there we know there has been incidents, several incidents that people are getting frustrated we have had several meetings since last week trying to calm our stevedores trying to inform them of what's happening we are waiting for government we are waiting for government but this has been a very long wait."

According to the Port of Belize, "PBL has notified the CWU, that PBL considers the actions of walking off the job and the continued refusal to work by the stevedores to be an unlawful strike...PBL is extremely concerned about these unlawful measures that have such a severe negative impact on businesses and consumers in Belize." End quote.

Flowers says that their decision to pull the plug at the port all boils down to their negotiations on pension and gang size.

Leonora Flowers, CWU President
"Because as we said at the last press conference the 1.05 that they offered to Stevedores is actually their own money. It's their pension savings that the PBL wants to give back to them so that it appears that they are actually giving something you can't give me something that I already own. That pension savings is what has been saved for them. The only thing the stevedores have been getting the sugar money offer was 1.6 million that was offered by the government by the prime minister. It ended up at 1.6 during the discussion. But the 100,000 is the legal fees? Yes."

"We were in a discussion with them and when you are in a negotiation you negotiate. We both can't get everything we want at any given time but we cannot bargain away our rights. Reducing the gang was a consideration based on going forward but they wanted to reduce the gang and they wanted to make it overall to all gangs as I said before there are gangs that have 17 members in that gang so then how can CWU as a responsible union allow the members to sign away four members out of one gang so all gangs will then become 13. If we had gone ahead and accepted that that's the picture we would have been looking at today. There was a steady creep of what the interim board wanted. Hence we pulled the plug and said stop this is going too far."

The Port of Belize says it is doing its best to urgently resume vessel loading and offloading.