Long Term Employees among San Pedro Town Council Workers Waiting for Severance

Orson Elrington

According to Elrington, sufficient time has been afforded to the Town Council and its attorneys to respond to the query.  Aside from a delay in response, Elrington says that at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, his clients entered into an agreement with the town council that they would accept a fifty percent pay cut until the financial situation at town hall would resume to normal.

Orson Elrington, Attorney-at-Law

“We would have written to the San Pedro Town Council in some circumstances more than a month ago and we had given them the normal seven-day notice or fourteen-day notice, I don’t remember what it was, for them to respond to us and for them to make arrangements to make our clients whole.  We have been speaking with counsel for a couple weeks now who has requested extensions in us taking the necessary legal action and we have obliged counsel for a couple weeks in extending the expiration of this notice.  However, regrettably, it seems that that notice will come to an expiration, a final expiration, either tomorrow or the day after without the counsel having positively responded and therefore we will be forced to take legal action to recover what is due to our clients. Many of these persons are simply hardworking, ordinary Belizeans who simply want to do what is best for their community and most importantly to provide for their families.  Therefore, it is most regrettable that these persons have been terminated.  Let’s use the example of one of the employees that I currently represent, they have been employed by the San Pedro Town Council for some twenty-one years, twenty-one years, and as a result of COVID, they went into an agreement with the town council that they would accept half of what is their pay.  So imagine the injustice which this person suffers when you calculate their pay at half what it should be and you still refuse to actually reimburse them for the funds which they would have surrendered over that time period with the understanding that you would be reimbursed when things go back to normality or, in this case, if you choose to sever the employer/employee relationship then you need to reimburse the person.”

News Five’s efforts to reach Mayor Nunez for comment today were not successful, but we welcome his comments on the matter for tomorrow’s newscast.