KHMHWU: ‘Every Time We Want a Meeting, We Have to Demonstrate’

The Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital Workers’ Union (KHMHWU) is calling on the government to urgently address unresolved pension concerns affecting hundreds of employees.

According to the union president, Andrew Baird, workers have been in a “struggle” for nearly six years to secure pension benefits promised under the Karl Heusner Act.

He said this morning during Open Your Eyes that while a mandatory provident fund was introduced for new employees from January 1, 2018, workers employed between 2000 and 2017 were left without any pension or fund coverage.

“Those workers, according to the Karl Heusner Act, in Section Eight, it states that the workers at Karl Heusner are pensionable in accordance with the Pension Act. So our claim is for those services,” Baird stated.

He added that while some older staff opted into the voluntary fund, many did not and remain without any pension plan. Of the 1,700 KHMH employees, around 350 are union members, mostly senior staff affected by this gap.

“From day one, our position is that we want full pension, and we’ve always said that we are open to flexibility,” Baird said.

Vice President Dr Alain Gonzalez said these workers have received no compensation for years of service and that union leaders have repeatedly sent requests for meetings with the government but have gone unanswered.

“It seems like every time we want a meeting with the government, we have to go to a demonstration… We have communicated with the government three times, and they have lacked to communicate back to us; they haven’t returned our emails, and they haven’t come back to us. And so we are like, These people are not taking us serious, and so this is why we get to the point of demonstrating and doing the plan of action because we have to make sure we are being heard; our hospital is the number one referral hospital in the entire country, the only tertiary hospital,” Gonzalez stated.

Baird warned that further industrial action is possible, stating, “We do not want our plan of action to extend to where we have to send in 21 days notice of strike action, even to work slow.”

This standoff with the government is part of an even bigger wave of unrest, as the Public Service Union and the Belize National Teachers’ Union have also launched their own protests and industrial actions over the past few days.