KHMHA Workers Union Stages Second Protest Over Pension Issues

Members of the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital Authority Workers Union demonstrated today in front of the hospital for the second time in less than a week. Just after midday, dozens of hospital workers gathered to protest what they say are long-standing pension issues. On Saturday, the union staged a walkout to call on the government to address the issue impacting its members. Shortly after, the Ministry of Health and the Financial Secretary scheduled a meeting with the union for Monday.  Despite this, however, the union moved to have a second round of protest.  The union’s Vice President Doctor Alain Gonzalez weighed in on the importance of today’s protest.  

Dr. Alain Gonzales, Vice President: “We already had this in the pipeline, we already had this planned that we wanted to make sure that today we come out strong. If you notice we are out here by the numbers they’re much bigger than when you came out Saturday. We have at least a hundred people so we wanted to make sure we came out strong today not really to apply pressure but to have the government know that you know what we did our work, we are public officers we have worked for the government we have worked for the hospital, we have worked for the community, we have worked for the people of this country and that we deserve our pension just as any other public workers in this country. Now it’s just a meeting back because our last meeting as we mentioned before was from October 2023 so that would have been maybe almost a year and two months and so we have tried in the past to meet with the government, tried in the past to communicate back to them and to reopen the pension negotiation but it has failed every time.”

Union Senator Glenfield Dennison attended the demonstration, emphasizing that today’s action was aimed at reiterating the rights of the workers who have dedicated their time to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital (KHMH). He added that time and time again, many have not even lived long enough to enjoy the fruits of the labour and the benefits owed to them.  

Glenfield Dennison, Union Senator: “This is really about securing the back bone healthcare professionals in this country who have decided to come and work in a statutory body, the Karl Heusner Memorial healthcare hospital authority and they are giving back. I myself have done two surgeries at this hospital you know. I believe in this hospital not because of the building, because of the people and it hurts my heart to think that these people have to worry about how they will feed themselves and their families in their old age. I am aware of several circumstances where the process for closing off people’s benefits needs some revision. I think we need to identify proper staffing to be able to deal with that and we need to go after the administrators and the managers to ensure that they are creating people’s files, updating people’s files so it’s not a situation where one year after you have retired you still have not collected your money to find out they don’t have a file for you or we don’t have an update.”

As the union chose to protest, Chandra Nisbet Cansino, CEO of the KHMH, conceded that the issue at hand has been a longstanding challenge, spanning several decades. Several attempts have been made to put the issue to bed through the gathering of multiple legal opinions, but to date the efforts have been futile.  CEO Cansino furthered that the union has been invited to dialogue next week to chart a new way forward.  One key note that the CEO highlighted was that the hospital’s operations were not interrupted during today’s protest.

Chandra Nisbet Cansino, CEO, KHMHA: “I honestly believe all workers deserve a pension. However, in this particular case, being public workers and serving the public, again, I do believe everybody deserves a pension including the workers at Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital. In this particular case it goes all the way back to 2009, 2010. I think Dr. Gonzalez mentioned this morning four years but it’s been a couple decades that this issue has been on the table, because I had to do some research myself. There have been various legal opinions on this very, very same issue. Before this union took it up, I think it was the Belize Medical and Dental Union they actually had an attorney look at it as well. And so there are, there is a lot of meetings that have been held, a lot of opinions that have been given. So it is not a recent concern. It is a concern that has been over the decades and it’s particularly referring to the period between 2001 and 2017, which is when the authority established the Provident Fund. So there’s that gap of about 15 years, 14, 15 years, where there is no pension coverage for those staff members. Despite the fact that they came over from the government voluntarily, some did not. Some of them still remain employees of the government so it’s not an issue for them, but it’s an issue for those that came over to the authority. We did have some concerns because we are an essential service and essential service workers operate under the Act, under the law. And so we did write to the Ministry of Labour yesterday to ask them to please address the issue, which they did. They called a meeting this morning at 8:30 for the authority and the union. We attended the meeting, but the union did not show up. Nevertheless, we were happy to come back and see that it was a very peaceful protest and that there weren’t any excesses in violations of anything at all.”

The union has noted that they stand ready to up its protest action should the matter go unresolved for much longer./