ANTIGUA-TRANSPORTATION-Union wants all regional governments to help in rescuing LIAT.

ST. JOHN’S, Antigua, The General Secretary of the Antigua and Barbuda Workers Union (ABWU), David Massiah, has called on Caribbean Community (CARICOM) seriously governments to get involved in the efforts to rescue the cash-strapped regional airline LIAT (1974) Limited following its collapse in 2020.

“All the governments in the Caribbean are hypocritical, and they are bastardizing the process with the LIAT workers. They should all sit together and come up with one plan to govern all the workers throughout LIAT so we could get LIAT, the regional airline, back in the air,” said Massiah, who also indicated that he had written to Prime Minister Gaston Browne last week and was still awaiting a response.

The airline was forced to close its operations and lay off its staff in March 2020 after the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated its financial difficulties. Last year, the Antigua & Barbuda government offered two million EC dollars (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) to partially satisfy the cash component of the compassionate payout to those former LIAT workers here.

In August, Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit said he wanted a “humanitarian’ resolution to the ongoing pay dispute, and last month, the St. Lucia government said former LIAT workers there would soon receive their outstanding termination benefits.

The government said EC$4.4 million in outstanding benefits would be paid to the former workers.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Browne told Parliament that the union’s insistence on receiving 100 percent payment for its workers had been the impediment in discussions, describing the union’s stance as “extremely unreasonable.”

LIAT, which is owned by the governments of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), owes millions of dollars (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) to its former employees, including pilots, who through their unions have been demanding the payments owed.

Messiah, speaking on Observer Radio here on Monday, said while he appreciated the offer by the St. Lucia prime Minister Phillip J Pierre to make the offer to former LIAT workers in his homeland, he should have instead come to Prime Minister Browne “and said look guys let us sit down and talk.

“Skerrit of Dominica would have indicated months ago that this is a moral obligation by the governments of the region to ensure that the LIAT workers are treated fairly. But none of them has done anything.

‘The new Prime Minister in Grenada (Dickon Mitchell) …there seems to be some comment where he has gone to bed with another airline, but they never paid LIAT over the period.

“Let me say this, whilst I can fight the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda on the way how he is handling it, I am saying that all of the leaders in the Caribbean should come together to deal with the issue of LIAT and its workers,” Massiah told radio listeners.

He said he had written to Prime Minister Browne on the issue of settling the severance for the former LIAT workers.

“That letter would have gone last week Thursday officially; I have not received a response as yet,” he said, acknowledging that it was during a Parliament sitting “we heard that there is an offer on the table…and that’s why we are writing.

“I could say this; the Prime Minister would have indicated …that the Antigua and Barbuda Workers Union is not representing the workers. We are still very much representing the workers …what is the problem is that this Labour government, this government which says it is caring to workers of any country, has disenfranchised the workers of LIAT more than anything else.”

Massiah said that the government has “president over a situation whereby the administrator would have gone to court in 2021 to ensure that all the collective agreements are disbanded and that no union, there is no collective action.

“So those workers who are working with LIAT presently do not have a union. We can’t represent them in a collective manner,” he said.

In July 2020, the High Court here granted a petition allowing for the reorganization of the cash-strapped regional airline, the appointment of an administrator, as well as staying all proceedings relating to the liquidation of the company.