TEMA SHIPYARD WORKERS RESOLVE TO CO-OPERATE (PAGE 29)

Management and Local Union of the PSC Tema Shipyard who had a long-standing stand-off between them have resolved to come together and work as social partners to create wealth for the company and the nation as a whole.
In pursuit of this, the management, as directed by the National Labour Commission to educate workers, contracted a labour consultancy firm, the Pulse Institute Africa, to assist the Shipyard in its human resource development and management of industrial crisis.
The Chief Executive Officer of the firm, Mr Austin Gamey, presented certificates of participation to 57 management and senior personnel and local union executive of the PSC Shipyard at Tema at the weekend after a two-day residential workshop on crisis management and appropriate dispute resolution.
Mr Gamey said the turbulent period was over and that the initial part of the workshop indicated that there was a yawing gap between labour and the management of the shipyard during the time of the standoff as “the word co-operation was non existent”.
He said the workshop also brought out open anger, use of abusive words with both sides blaming each other.
Mr Gamey was happy to note that at the end of the workshop, which was on the theme Conversation for a change ‘working in a 21st century setting’, management and workers had understood to use language skills effectively.
He said there were other shipyard companies in the sub-region which needed customers and, therefore, if they of Tema PSC continued to fight, both the workers and management would be the losers.
Mr Gamey advised both parties to continue speaking to each other in a gentle, honest, open and specific manner until they found a convergence point to enable them to work together to satisfy customers and protect their job security .
He disclosed that six other persons drawn from the union, senior staff and Management were undergoing special training in Appropriate Dispute Resolution (ADR) to enable them to study specific facilitation in Managerial Mediation, Self Mediation and Executive Mediation to be able to handle issues themselves without a third party or professional mediator.
The Head of Human Resource and Administration, Mr Musah Issah Haruna, noted that the company just came out of an industrial crisis and hoped it would not occur again, stressing that both workers and management had suffered some consequences.
He stated that there was the need to train and re-train employees on a wide range of issues as part of the company’s human capital development and labour-related issues.
The Secretary of the local union Mr George Arthur, commended Pulse Concultancy, for being firm in its training.
He said the last time when workers and management had crisis was in December 2008 when all members of the executive of the PSC Shipyard Company were asked to go on interdiction for fighting for the workers whose bonus was to be taxed wrongly.
Mr Arthur said he was optimistic that the intervention of the Labour Commission and Pulse Consultancy came at a good time and had helped restore all misunderstanding.
The entire workforce which had gathered at the presentation ceremony went gay calling names which hitherto would have sparked off industrial crisis.