7 News Belize

Street Workers Complain About Layoff
posted (November 11, 2014)
In October we told you about the commencement of the municipal drainage project. Work has started with heavy trenching on Douglas Jones Street and off Calle Al Mar by the Princess Casino.

But this morning work on Douglas Jones stopped after the Ministry of Works sent a cease and desist letter to contractor Medina's Construction Ltd. The release instructs David Medina to shut down the project until certain health and safety measures are reinforced. These include providing personal protective equipment to workers and providing a cleaning works methodology. Apart from that workers must be monitored because the letter says that businesses have been complaining about loitering.

Now, these manual labourers are mostly street guys who are getting a rare opportunity at a straight job - so this morning when they got the news that their component of the project was being halted - they were fuming. 7News was there:..

Courtney Weatherburne reporting
These are the tools that the employees working on the Douglas Jones Canal Project at Cinderella Plaza put down this morning after the Ministry of Works sent this letter ordering that all drainage works in the area cease immediately. Now these 30 plus disgruntled workers, who have no other source of regular income, are making a public outcry to get the contract reinstated. They say it's the complaints of businesses in the area that caused this stoppage.

Worker #1
"What is going on out here, what is really causing our work to stop are the businesses. They are complaining about the water, the smell of it and they say that we are loiter in front on their shop. They say that we are smoking weed in front of their shop."

Worker #2
"I go home and tell my daughter that I have a job and I have to get it done, but once we don't have a job then how can we make an income?"

They're not fighting for the royal treatment. The work is grimy stuff, plunging into holes filled with murky water and shoveling for hours a day. But these workers are unperturbed by these conditions because it all pays off in the end - when little else does.

Worker #2
"We know it's not sanitary, but we need the job. We have rubber boots home and we bring it. We bring our own personal shovel."

Worker #3
"We already use the sun beating down on us. All of us have children. All of us have children going to school. We don't even know how we will put food on the table later. Enough of us are out here trying to settle down. We don't want to rob, we don't want to do any kind of stupidness out here."

Worker #4
"We don't have a problem with the job because at the end of the day we have our family to feed and the job needs to be done and bill are there to pay."

It seems that since that outburst the ministry of works has sort of "gotten the sense" and will be meeting with the workers tomorrow when they are expected to be re-instated with a stricter code of conduct and work rules.

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