While he said it’s troubling 700 employees will be made redundant at Atlantis, Minister of Tourism and Aviation Dionisio D’Aguilar pointed to at least 1,200 new jobs in the hotel sector that will come on stream in the coming months.
Atlantis announced on Tuesday that the drastically changed travel environment led it to make fundamental shifts by reducing the size of its 7,300 strong workforce.
D’Aguilar said the majority of the 700 employees who are to be made redundant at the end of this month were furloughed.
He added that as more hotels reopen and expand, more jobs will soon be added to the sector.
“But it is troubling, 700 people, but we counter that with Baha Mar opening its water park in July with 300 employees, Sandals will be coming on stream at the beginning of November with 903 employees, so there are ebbs and flows in tourism and it will happen,” D’Aguilar said while addressing the Rotary Club of South East Nassau’s virtual meeting yesterday.
“I think a number of those employees, if not all of those employees, were in a state of furlough. Now what they’re doing is concretizing what is happening. They’re not engaged and they were in a state of furlough because Atlantis was navigating its cash flow concerns.”
Atlantis revealed in a statement on Tuesday that even though it expects to fully recover and is encouraged by business volumes, the COVID-19 pandemic caused the company to suffer significant losses.
President of the Bahamas Hotel Catering and Allied Workers Union Darrin Woods told Guardian Business earlier this week that Atlantis was the last major hotel, other than the British Colonial Hilton hotel, to make a final decision on furloughed workers. D’Aguilar said the company had to take time because of the sheer volume of long-term employees on its books.
“If you compare Atlantis to Baha Mar, Atlantis obviously has thousands of employees that have been there for decades and then you’ve got Baha Mar, which only started in 2017, so most of its staff have been there for three years or less. So it’s very easy for Baha Mar to sever, two or three years, they’re gone,” he said.
“When it comes to Atlantis, that was a big number and given the impact of COVID-19 on its balance sheet, on its income statements, it was significantly impactful so it tried as best as possible to navigate the disengagement of staff with the cash that came in from their investors and all the rest of it. So I think they’ve sorted out their financing issues and are probably in a position now to create some finality to what actually existed. This state of being furloughed was very frustrating for a lot of people, they’ve moved on, they’ve gotten new jobs, they just wanted to be disengaged, paid out and move on.”
Atlantis is the largest private employer in The Bahamas and this is the largest redundancy exercise in the hotel’s history.
The post Atlantis redundancies but more hotel jobs on the way, says minister of tourism appeared first on The Nassau Guardian.
source https://thenassauguardian.com/atlantis-redundancies-but-more-hotel-jobs-on-the-way-says-minister-of-tourism/
No comments:
Post a Comment