Senior trade unionist Vincent Morrison says while the country is inching back to normality, the Union of Clerical, Administrative and Supervisory Employees (UCASE), which he heads, is still handling several cases of workers who were unfairly dismisssed from their jobs for either refusing COVID-19 vaccines or inappropriate mask-wearing.

That, he aruged, shows that those employers who had erminated staff, had “manufactured a crisis that wasn’t worth it”.

Speaking against the background of waning COVID-19 caseloads and deaths, and Jamaica being nowhere near herd immunity — with just 22 per cent of citizens fully vaccinated — Morrison said while the health crisis is not yet over, “time has shown” that those dismissals were superfluous.

“It wasn’t necessary, and maybe it’s because of inexperience. We have never had a crisis of this proportion, but it just goes to show that in these matters we should not rush to a conclusion but rather deal with it on a timely basis,” he told the Jamaica Observer.

“I know for sure that there are some outstanding cases now, especially among workers who were not unionised. But we have settled about eight or nine other cases. In some cases, about three have gone back to the work. In other cases, the workers didn’t want to return so they took compensation,” Morrison said.

One case of note, he said, involves a worker employed to a popular company for close to three decades who was “summarily terminated by the management for not having the mask over his nose”.

“He had on the mask, but they claim he didn’t have the mask over his nose, this is a worker with 20-odd, nearly 30 years of service — an excellent worker,” Morrison said.

“There was another worker with a security organisation who went to do the COVID-19 test. She was given a letter by the Ministry of Health officials to take back to the company and her case is still unresolved. The company has offered her compensation, but the compensation is totally unsatisfactory,” the UCASE president said further.

“I think what is necessary going forward is that we put in place the structures for these crises,” Morrison said.

The first case of COVID-19 in the island was officially declared in March 2020.

As the pandemic wore on and cases spiked alarmingly, several companies introduced COVID-19 mitigation measures requiring employees to get vaccinated or present evidence of COVID-19 tests on a regular basis. Some entities went as far as to indicate that an employee’s failure to comply would result in termination.

In August last year, Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) Director General Dr Wayne Henry said data from the April 2021 labour market survey indicated that more than half of the 151,100 people who lost their jobs in July 2020, during the initial stages of the novel coronavirus pandemic, have been reinstated.

This figure, he said, amounts to some 84,400 people, despite the employed labour force declining by 40,500 people to 1,206,000 that April, relative to the same period in 2019 when the last corresponding survey was conducted.

No survey was undertaken in 2020 due to COVID-19.

Dr Henry noted that while not comparable because of seasonality factors, when compared with January 2020 when Jamaica recorded its pre-COVID-19 employment high, “employment levels have increased since July 2020, as the economy gradually reopens”.

“Pre-COVID-19 employment levels should be attained in fiscal year 2022/23,” he said at the PIOJ’s digital quarterly media briefing.