FOR the 21 years she was contracted as a security guard she, like so many others, got no paid vacation leave, no sick leave with pay, and for her two pregnancies the four months each she spent at home for maternity leave were under her own steam.

When the Supreme Court in September last year, in a precedent, ruled that effective then, third-party security guards employed to Marksman Security Limited are employees and not independent contractors, and that the company should immediately begin paying over their three per cent National Housing Trust statutory contributions, she thought that would mean better.

On the contrary the woman, along with several of her colleagues, have not worked since April 1 due to a stand-off between themselves and the security guard firm to which they were contracted. At the heart of the controversy is the insistence by their management that the new terms and conditions of their employment in the company, which has undergone a name change, would not accommodate applicable redundancy payments.

Now she is among scores who are choosing to find other ways to survive while they await the result of a court action filed by a newly formed Security Guard Taskforce which will be hauling that entity and at least one other before the courts at the end of this year.

“After working for 21 years they now are denying me the rights of getting what is truly mine. Why am I to continue with them? Mi just believe the treatment was too harsh. You leave home, go work, and are told you can’t take up duty because you don’t sign the contract,” the woman, who was among dozens of security guards taking part in a meeting at the Union of Clerical, Administrative and Supervisory Employees (UCASE) offices on West King’s House Road in St Andrew on Sunday, told the Jamaica Observer.

“To work 21 years without even maternity leave? I had two children during the time I worked with them and nothing. Four months I was home [after each delivery] and got nothing, not a dollar. I never got a health card, no insurance, nothing. Me believe me deserve mi money and mi want it — 21 years no insurance, no benefits, nothing,” she declared.

Asked how she managed without formal employment over the past four months the woman said she has created her own niche.

“I buy and sell; I do poultry. I realise I am in a bit of a different position from some of the persons to the persons who sign. I can understand somewhat, but I am used to creating my own employment — I don’t just sit and wait on just the salary. So before now mi [was] always a hustler, so to step out and say I am going to do it on my own wasn’t hard; God always bless me. Right now I am making and selling natural juices and I am just searching for a market,” she told the Observer.

As to whether her employers should have a change of heart and renegotiate the terms she said, “I don’t believe I want to go back to any security company and work; 21 years is enough. I have two children [one is an adult] and when I look on them I am like, ‘Look how much years mi waste.’ But mi want mi money — mi believe mi deserve to get every dollar there is.

“What we are saying is that there are a number of issues that have to be settled before you can ask the workers to sign these new contracts, such as outstanding NHT payments, National Insurance Scheme [NIS] payments. Workers have had injuries on the job — some were shot, some had motor vehicle accidents — and all of these are matters that the workers are saying need to be resolved before we can sign. What has been happening is that workers who refuse to sign, they have been victimised by lay-offs; they turn up for work and are not assigned any duty,” president of UCASE Vincent Morrison told the Observer on Sunday.

“To ask a worker who is transitioning with the company [to a new regime] to sign a document extinguishing their benefits, that is not the law or the practice, that is not how we do it in Jamaica, and we have a lot of examples of that here. So, to ask them to sign away their rights in this way, especially in light of the fact that the court established that they are employees and not contractors, it would not only be unfair but unjust,” Morrison charged.