Diamond Hospital employees claim owed salaries, leave passage

Sep 16, 2011 News

A number of disgruntled employees at the East Bank Regional Hospital (Diamond Hospital) are claiming that for the past several months they have been executing duties without receiving their “rightfully earned” salaries.
Reports are that 13 of the staff have been working without any payment and some have resorted to borrowing money in order to ‘get to work’.
Others reportedly have to depend on friends and families to assist in paying their monthly bills and expenses.
Kaieteur News understands that these staffers never had an issue with salaries until they ‘went off on annual leave’.
It was after they returned to the hospital to resume their duties and renew their contracts, that is when this problem arose.
According to Eloise Amsterdam, she resumed duties after taking her annual leave on June 4, and to date has not received her salary for the months of June, July and August.
“It is very hard because all the time we didn’t have no problem, but now after coming back from leave is a problem to pay we our money. We work for it. I call the finance department at the Regional Office. Everyday you hearing ‘tomorrow, tomorrow you getting pay’ and nothing coming. Then they saying how I am not on the payroll. How can that be? When I sign documents to renew my contract and I does sign in time in a book at the hospital? I working all the time. I keep asking why I am not getting paid and they saying they won’t be able to say why. I had to take my daughter out of play school for weeks now because I don’t have money to pay daycare now.”
Another employee at the hospital, Shelly Alexander, explained that from August to now she has not received her leave passage and is being given the ‘royal runaround’.
“They telling me check in the bank. I go and nothing there. Then I call and tell them and they telling me how I must check back… and I keep going all the time and no money ain’t meeting. It hard. How we must reach to work if we ain’t get a dollar to do so?” questioned Alexander.
An attendant, Clive Williams, at the health facility stated that seven months have passed and he has not received any payment for his services. This has become very frustrating and his expenses are barely being met since he has already borrowed over $100,000 from people to pay bills and survive.
“I got to pay me rent. Courts showing up everyday at my workplace. I live till at Timehri and have to get passage to come to work everyday and I ain’t getting paid. You think it easy? Many of we got to keep borrowing and borrowing but how will we get to pay back? With what? We just want our rightful money,” said Williams.
This newspaper was further told that some of the staffers were allowed to borrow a maximum of $20,000 “advance” and they were issued with documents quite recently which ordered that they should begin to repay the money loaned to them.
“Where we going to get money to pay back the loan if they ain’t paying we our salary for so long?” asked another staff.
Both Minister of Local Government, Norman Whittaker, and the Regional Chairman, Clement Corlette, told Kaieteur News that they was not aware of this situation until it was brought to their attention yesterday by the media.
They promised to have the matter thoroughly investigated.

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Diamond Hospital employees claim owed salaries, leave passage

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