The General Secretary of the Antigua and Barbuda Workers’ Union (ABWU), David Massiah, has called on the Caribbean Community (Caricom) governments to seriously get involved in the efforts to rescue the cash-strapped regional airline, LIAT (1974) Limited following its collapse in 2020.
“All the governments in the Caribbean are hypocritical and they are bastardising the process with the LIAT workers.
They should all sit together and come up with one plan to govern all the workers throughout LIAT and so we could get LIAT, the regional airline back in the air,” said Massiah, who also indicated that he had written to Prime Minister Gaston Browne last week and was still awaiting a response.
The airline was forced to end its operations and lay off its staff in March 2020 after the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated its finances.
Last year, the Antigua & Barbuda government offered two million EC dollars to partially satisfy the cash component of the compassionate payout to former LIAT workers in Antigua.
In August, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said he wanted a “humanitarian’ resolution to settle the ongoing pay dispute and last month, the St Lucia government said former LIAT workers there would soon receive their outstanding termination benefits.
The government said EC$4.4 million in outstanding benefits will be paid to the former workers.
SOURCE: CMC
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You know if people don’t learn from history, then they are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
List which was born from a failure has gone on to fail twice more. Pretty much every government in the world has given up on running airlines, they simply don’t do it well. Instead of pouring buckets of cash into another version of Liat, which will inevitably be a drain on the resources of any island that signs up, we’d be better off selling the landing rights to an airline that actually knows how to run a profitable operation.
Strangely the union boss is now echoing what Gaston Browne has been calling for since day one. And where was he then? Surely not standing beside Gaston. These guys are such hypocrites it’s not funny
Hypocrite???? They are downright USELESS!
Finally Mr. Massiah…. you have taken PM Browne’s advice. Better late than never at all…. It shows clearly that the PM has what it takes VISION, INTELLIGENCE & GREAT LEADERSHIP QUALITIES
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