Monday, 5 October 2015

Impact of Arcelor Mittal Point Lisas Ltd vs. Steel Workers Union Privy Council decision.



On the 6th August 2015 the Privy Council dismissed an appeal brought by Arcelor Mittal Point Lisas Ltd (Company).


The Industrial Court in its judgement dated the 31st July 2009 found that the contract workers were engaged by agencies for the purpose of providing their services to the company. The consequence of that finding, is that the company is deemed by s 2(4)(b) of the Industrial Relations Act to be the employer of the contract workers under labour only contracts and as such existing collective agreements applied to these workers.

Section 2(4)(b) of the Act states “When a person engages the services of a worker for the purpose of providing those services to another, then, such other person shall be deemed to be employer of the worker under a labour only contract”


With most local telecom providers utilizing more and more contract labour what is the likely impact of this judgement on providers?
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9 October 2015 at 00:27

    This is an interesting and important development for industrial relations. I can appreciate the need to protect temporary employees from being exploited by organisations seeking to enhance their financial statements and reduce cost at the expense of people, while pursuing narrow interests.

    Where has the desire for organisations to serve communities gone? Granted that this undertaking must be done profitably for it to be successful, but I would think that being effective at providing service or product and providing sustainability for stakeholders would be sufficient. The reality is that greed has become the order of the day and everyone are demanding more. More profits, more bonuses, more salaries and benefits, while neglecting the social responsibility. A typical result is temporary employees in an organisation receiving significantly less benefits than permanent employees.

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  2. Derrick9 October 2015 at 12:29

    Interesting viewpoint. For me clearly employers will continue to seek ways to reduce cost and increase profits, as clearly that’s one of the reasons that you are in business. Outsourcing is really a cost containment strategy granted that other benefits should accrue, but lets bring it back to Telecoms given that we can spend a significant amount of time on workers rights and management/owner responsibilities. This judgment also begs the following questions:

    1) Whether telecom providers are getting 100% productivity from their employees (inclusive of management). If not, they need to start examining their performance management systems and enforcing it.

    2) How efficient are the operations of the telecom providers in T&T and I am not looking at financial efficiency ratios here.

    a. Are job functions so designed as to reduce cost by reducing truck roles?
    b. Is infrastructure configurable and as such limits truck roles.
    c. To what extent customers have the ability to configure, pay etc for services online

    3) Does this impact investment in the telecoms sector?

    Sadly, it speaks to the need for a major overhaul of our judicial system as this case started in 1998. But then that might have been a strategy :-)

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