| Labour Minister Says Lingua Franca Fine In Workplace |
| Fri, September 26, 2014 |
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Earlier on you saw what Immigration Minister Godwin Hulse had to say about the Caracol cop killing. But, he's also Minister of Labour and we asked him for his comments on the recent controversy over the First Caribbean Dangriga Branch - where one employee resigned after she claims she was reprimanded for speaking to a customer in Garifuna. The matter has been taken up by her union and could end up as a labour dispute - so we asked the Labour Minister - and former bank employee what he though of it:..
Hon. Godwin Hulse, Minister of Labour
"My simple unequivocal position is that this is a multi-racial, multi-lingual society. We do business and commerce in the English language, but when we deal with our people we are all free to discourse in the language we are most comfortable with and should be free and nobody should impose any impediment. I will say though that before you were born, back in 1964, when I worked in the Royal Bank of Canada, we were forbidden to speak anything but the English language. Those were the good old colonial days, part of what I fought against to help to bring us to independence, so I am not going to support or countenance any nonsense when it comes to people's race, creed, ethnicity, religion or otherwise."
Newspaper reports say that the Bank Manager has been transferred.
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