UFA misses Divi
win by one vote
~ Will files for second referendum in six months ~
LITTLE BAY--United Federation of the Windward Antilles (UFA) missed the Divi Little Bay referendum win by one vote on Wednesday. No one was announced winner of the referendum and the workers are now without a union.
A union needs at least 42 votes to win – half the total number of workers eligible voters plus one. Of the 83 workers who were eligible to vote, 41 of the workers voted for UFA, while 17 cast their ballots in favour of Windward Islands Federation of Union (WIFOL), which had previously represented the workers. Two votes were for management and two were invalid. UFA Advisor Willy Haize said the invalid vote was from a worker who voted for both the UFA and WIFOL.
“In a case like this, it’s the management of the company that has won because they are not obligated to talk to any union,” WIFOL President Theophilus Thompson said shortly after the ballots were counted yesterday.
Haize said UFA will be filing for another referendum in another six months, but said the union will be available to represent the workers in the interim if the need arises. “The point is that we beat WIFOL because we got 41 votes but legally we needed 42 votes to win. At least we know that the workers are more in favour of UFA but two of them voted wrongly,” Haize said.
Asked how he felt about the results, Thompson said: “Our members didn’t come out to vote, but UFA’s members who were there came out. I expected this result because WIFOL has 41 members at Divi and, over the past years, some of them had left the company mainly because of training the programme and some went to Westin to hold positions as supervisors.”
Thompson said the union will still try to broach talks with management to continue providing representation to its members at Divi.
Haize had said earlier that the employees had approached the union for representation because they were disappointed in the representation of their current union. Haize said the workers built confidence in UFA when the union stepped up to represent a Divi employee who had been incarcerated and assisted other workers who were in problems at the resort.
