Ministry wraps up pensions public meetings

| 18/08/2015 | 1 Comment

(CNS Business): Community members gathered one last time on Thursday night at the George Town Town Hall to discuss the proposed changes the Ministry of Employment and the Department of Labour and Pensions have suggested in the National Pensions Law 2015. Minister of Employment Tara Rivers said the ministry set out to gain public input on this bill as well as the Labour Law two months ago, but even with this approach, Rivers said that “in some corners we our heroes and in some corners we are still villains”. 

Ministry leaders said they would continue to accept written submissions until 31 August and then address the suggestions in the bill before final amendments are made to the Labour Law and the National Pensions Law prior to the bills being presented to the House.

CNS Business

Mario Ebanks, Director of Labour and Pensions

Rivers said that the purpose of this “listening tour” was to set a standard of compliance amongst the islands so unruly employers would begin taking the steps to pay what they owe to pensions plans and in return either receive a fine or a letter of compliance on behalf of the Department of Labour and Pensions. The compliance letter will now be a requirement before a business owner applies or renews their Trade and Business license.

Several questions were raised during the final meeting by many concerned community members.

Watch the CNS Business report to hear their concerns.

Tags: , , ,

Category: Employment, Featured, Local Business

Comments (1)

Trackback URL | Comments RSS Feed

  1. Anonymous says:

    The compliance letter should also be a requirement before a work permit is obtained. I say this because of the huge numbers of casual and unskilled laborers we have on-island most of whose employers have no pension scheme whatsoever, or claim that they have one and collect premiums but don’t pay into one, and worse still, expect their employees to pay back the cost of their work permits through deductions from their weekly or monthly pay packets. The building industry is the worst offender on the latter point.

Leave a Reply to AnonymousCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.