GUEST COLUMN: Dismissal at will?

By Professor George D. Nicholson | Wed, September 01, 2010 - 12:00 AM

Thank you for publishing my “letter” on August 17, which has elicited at least one response. I have been absent from Barbados in the interim, and regret the apparent tardiness of this response.

My “letter” was an attempt to illuminate the issues, to indicate that my “medical colleagues”, in their “benign simplicity”, (no! beneficence or assumption of ethical practice by their employers or whatever!) have been signing on to contracts that permitted their summary dismissal.

Clearly, they never anticipated confrontation with such an eventuality. And who can blame them?

Philip Corbin is incorrect in stating that provision for summary dismissal is a universal practice. This is incorrect, as some states in the United States do not so permit. But this is not the only major issue confronting consultants at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH).

In spite of the expiration of contracts for six months and more, employees’ expectations of re-employment are now revealed to be irrelevant, having been based on no more sound bases than precedence compounded by a dysfunctional administrative process that antecedes the accession of the “new QEH board” to the management of the premier hospital in the English-speaking Caribbean. Their employment has been “at will” on a month-to-month basis, as has happened over the past several years.

Employmen practices

It would appear that, without stated “cause”, opportunity for rebuttal, or “arbitrational process”, there can be summary dismissal of long-standing employees of the QEH. I trust that this is not the way in which The Nation separates itself from its employees, and would welcome your public indication of your own employment practices.

I say this not to challenge those practices, but to provide you with an opportunity to articulate your, The Nation’s, approach to these issues, and to distance yourselves from Corbin’s comments – if you can.

I have difficulty in accepting that summary dismissal without “due cause” could ever be an acceptable reason for dismissal from contractual employment. But then, I have never attempted to order my beliefs, responsibilities or practices on what others might or might not find acceptable.

While it may be an option that an employer might wish to exercise, that option requires precise specification, either within the contract itself or in some official “book of company rules”. So I believe, and it is for Corbin to persuade me otherwise.

That suggestion that such contracts are “universal”, as Corbin suggests, is readily refuted. The power of the Internet provides one the opportunity to discover the diversity of employment “contracts” current in the United States, and throughout the developed world.

There is only one “major” hospital employing “consultant clinicians” in Barbados. It is owned and funded by the Government of Barbados. Such a body cannot be associated with less than ethical practice when the question of dismissal is contemplated.

I hold no brief for any clinician guilty of flagrant unprofessional practice in the care of her or his patients, but I would not sign a contract such as that offered by the QEH. That would be my personal choice.

And yes, I am an “unreasonable” man. I never intended to leave this world as I found it and started rebelling against conventional wisdom from age seven. That’s precisely why there have been haemodialysis units and cadaver renal transplantation in Jamaica for the past 40 years, and dialysis units in Barbados, Guyana, and Antigua.