Hampden workers to get $22M next week
WESTERN BUREAU — The roughly 450 employees of the state-owned Hampden Estates in Trelawny, whose positions are to be made redundant at the end of this month, are to receive $22 million in lieu of notice next week.
“The workers are to start receiving the money by Thursday and the payments should be completed by the end of that week,” Livingstone Morrison, chief executive officer of the Sugar Company of Jamaica (SCJ), told the Observer Thursday.
Another $68 million in redundancy payments is to be made to the workers by the year’s end, the SCJ boss added.
The workers are, in the interim, attending workshops conducted by psychologist, Dr Leahcim Semaj. The workshops, Morrison said, are geared at preparing them for life after redundancy and cover areas including writing a resume, becoming an entrepreneur and effective money management.
It was last month that the SCJ announced that estate workers would be made redundant at the end of this month and disclosed plans for a $multi-million development of the financially strapped facility.
The development plan, which is to be implemented in September, requires a capital injection of $212 million in the first two years and a further $158 million in the third year. It includes:
* the planting of 1,300 hectares of sugar cane and the refurbishing and modernisation of the distillery;
* the cultivation of 200 hectares of crops other than sugar cane and the development of the estate as a tourist attraction; and
* the construction of a bottling plant.
Morrison has told the Observer that once the plan is implemented operations at the estate would require 150 workers in the initial stages. More persons, he said, would be employed in the succeeding years.
Meanwhile earlier this year the SCJ made 200 Hampden workers redundant following the government’s closure of the sugar processing plant last December after it was revealed that it had lost $458 million in the five-year period leading up to 2002. Agriculture minister, Roger Clarke, told Parliament then that the factory would require up to $400 million in new investments to bring its old machinery to minimum-level efficiency.
