THE BARBADOS WORKERS’ Union (BWU) has not abandoned those who have lost their jobs in the sweeping public sector cuts.
BWU senior assistant general secretary Orlando Scott said the trade union was currently offering programmes to assist such people to deal with the reality of Government’s austerity programme.
“What we have done is to bring in a psychiatrist and we had people from the Psychiatric Hospital and Network Services.
“We invited human resource managers and personnel managers at Solidarity House to show them how they should treat those who are to be laid off and the ones who were already on the breadline.
“We realise it had affected people’s mental health and that is why we ran that programme so HR managers would be able to do the appropriate things in terms of how they can counsel those people,” he said.
This programme was part of the BWU’s Week Of Excellence, which continued earlier this week at the union’s Labour College in Mangrove, St Philip.
Scott said the focus was on customer relations as Barbados was slipping on service excellence. He said the union teamed up with the Office of Public Sector Reform, the Productivity Council and the Barbados Employers’ Confederation to host a workshop on Quality Service Delivery And Impacting Customer Relations.
“The reason why we are focusing on quality service delivery and effective customer relations is that we believe that, over time, there may have been a slippage but we believe very strongly that for Barbados to move ahead we need to hone the skills of those persons involved in customer relations.
“Barbados is a service economy and we need always to have customer service delivery on the front burner wherever we interact with the public – not just for tourists, we have to deliver the same service quality to locals,” he said.
This was the 12th year for the Week Of Excellence.
Director of the Office of Public Sector Reform, Michael Archer, said it was time for the divide between the public and private sectors to be bridged as both entities had much to teach the other.
(CA)
