Solace Myers *www.htsstlucia.org
It is not clear whether an agreement will be reached between the National Workers Union (NWU) and the Windward and Leeward Brewery Limited over its recent retrenchment of two workers.
Discussions are expected to continue between the two bodies after a most recent meeting, held on Wednesday July 17, 2013 yielded no results.
Deputy President General of the NWU Solace Myers said the labour commissioner also sat in on these deliberations.
“As it stands right now… we were not able to arrive at a conclusion at that meeting however, we hope to be able to engage the company in some further discussions and basically see the way forward in that regard,” she told St Lucia News Online (SNO).
Choosing only to make a brief statement on the matter, Myers said she could not put a time frame on when negotiations would be finalized.
“We don’t have a time frame as we speak. What we can say is that the dialogue has started and we’ll see how it goes from there,” she said.
According to a previous NWU release, the brewery said its redundancies were due to a decline in sales.
Employees at the brewery had taken industrial action in protest of the redundancies of the two seasoned workers. They staged a silent protest outside the company premises in last Friday.
“Workers were displeased at the way talks were going. So basically they were probably a little bit frustrated and angry as to how it was going and [were]hoping that we were going to be able to sit down with the company and move the process forward,” she told SNO.