Ex-UWI worker loses bid to revive case against OWTU

Derek Achong

Se­nior Re­porter

[email protected]

A for­mer em­ploy­ee of the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) has lost an ap­peal over the dis­missal of her case chal­leng­ing the qual­i­ty of rep­re­sen­ta­tion she re­ceived from the Oil­field Work­ers’ Trade Union (OW­TU). 

De­liv­er­ing judg­ment last week, Chief Jus­tice Ron­nie Boodoos­ingh and Ap­pel­late Judges Mark Mo­hammed and Maria Wil­son dis­missed Tiangeh Brath­waite-Ever­s­ley ap­peal seek­ing to re­sus­ci­tate her case against the trade union. 

Brath­waite-Ever­s­ley filed the law­suit against the OW­TU as she was not sat­is­fied with how it han­dled her griev­ances with UWI over un­rea­son­able de­duc­tions from her salary, a lack of con­sul­ta­tion re­gard­ing leave en­ti­tle­ments and al­leged pro­mo­tion dis­crim­i­na­tion based on her preg­nan­cy. 

She claimed breach of con­tract and the du­ty of fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion. 

The union suc­cess­ful­ly ap­plied for the case to be struck out on the ba­sis that she did not dis­close the con­tract terms it was al­leged to have breached. 

It al­so claimed that she could not pur­sue a claim in tort for fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion as such law­suits were not per­mit­ted against trade unions un­der Sec­tion 6 of the Trade Dis­putes Act. 

In de­ter­min­ing the ap­peal, Jus­tice Mo­hammed, who wrote the judg­ment, stat­ed that the judge was not shown to be plain­ly wrong for re­fus­ing to en­ter­tain the case. 

“The Judge ap­proached the ap­pli­ca­tion in a sys­tem­at­ic and struc­tured man­ner. She adroit­ly bal­anced the per­ti­nent fac­tors, took in­to ac­count all of the rel­e­vant fac­tors and did not take in­to ac­count any ir­rel­e­vant fac­tor,” Jus­tice Mo­hammed said. 

He al­so found that the union was en­ti­tled to avail it­self of the statu­to­ry im­mu­ni­ty pro­vid­ed by the leg­is­la­tion. 

“There is noth­ing in­her­ent­ly ab­surd, un­wise or dan­ger­ous about such a pro­vi­sion in the Trade Dis­putes Act,” he said. 

“In these cir­cum­stances, we are of the view that to im­ply a con­trac­tu­al du­ty as a mat­ter of pub­lic pol­i­cy would de­feat the in­tent and pur­pose of the statu­to­ry ouster,” he added. 

The union was rep­re­sent­ed by Clay Hack­ett.