Law changes to address firings, severance pay

The Cayman Islands government will require local employers to report worker redundancies to the Labour and Immigration Departments and will seek to increase the severance amount paid to laid-off or wrongfully terminated employees in upcoming revisions to the Labour Law. 

Employment Minister Tara Rivers did not specify when the proposed amendments would come before the Legislative Assembly, but said there would be some 80 proposed changes to the current law, which has not seen a significant overhaul in a decade.  

“The government agrees [the current labor law] is inadequate,” Ms. Rivers said last week. Two issues particularly troubling to the Progressives-led government were identified in a private members motion made last week by independent East End MLA Arden McLean.  

Mr. McLean’s motion asked the government to consider requiring companies that made Caymanian workers redundant “to prove such redundancy to the labor department and to notify the immigration boards” about the lay offs.  

In a number of instances he had been made aware of, Mr. McLean said companies had made Caymanian workers redundant and sought to replace them in what was essentially the same job with a work permit holder.  

Mr. McLean referred to a specific case where a local resort had laid off several long-time Caymanian employees. The Cayman Compass is not identifying the company because the case is current being investigated by the Labour Appeals Tribunal and the Immigration Department.  

In reference to one of the laid-off workers, Mr. McLean said: “How much more experience do you need than 25 years on the job? This is an events manager or something of that nature, 25 years, not one disciplinary complaint on this lady’s file. And just out of the clear blue sky, because we bring in some foreigner to take over? What are we doing?”  

The motion also sought to significantly increase the monetary award given to a wrongfully dismissed employee. Mr. McLean proposed, in cases where the Labour Appeals Tribunal ruled a wrongful firing had occurred, to make the employee eligible to receive up to three years salary. 

“Maybe we will be vilified for this, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do,” he said.  

He referenced the Turks and Caicos Islands as having employment legislation with much stronger protections for local workers who are made redundant. Under Turks law, workers who have been on the job for less than two years, would be eligible to receive two weeks pay for each year they were at the company. If they had been at the company longer than two years, they would receive a month’s severance pay for each year worked.  

Minister Rivers agreed that Cayman’s current Labour Law’s one-week pay requirement for each year worked in unfair dismissal or redundancy cases simply was not fair. Upcoming amendments to the Labour Law would seek to correct that matter, she said.  

Similar changes, and others, were already under consideration in a draft Labour Law the government intended to put out for public consultation, possibly later this year, Minister Rivers said.  

She said there had been 202 cases where employees reported unfair terminations to the Labour Appeals Tribunal in the past year. More than 80 percent had been resolved through mediation. 

In the case of Caymanian worker redundancies, “there should be some form of reporting or proof requirement for employers to justify their actions,” she said. For instance, she said, government could look into whether a company had similar positions filled by non-Caymanians who might have been made redundant instead. The government could also review if there were other jobs in the company the employee might have been trained to fill. 

All Legislative Assembly members present on Wednesday evening voted to support Mr. McLean’s motion.