GTP’s insulting package for 124 sacked workers

In what looks like the biggest industrial joke of all-time, a pitiful bunch of 124 ex-workers of the Ghana Textiles Company Ltd have been paid a paltry ¢20,000 as end-of-service-benefit, in contravention of an Appeals Court ruling that had sat earlier in the year, under the auspices of Justice Victor Ofoe.

By that woeful gesture, GTP which is represented in court rather ironically by counsels Joseph Aryeetey, a former Labour Commission Chairman and his partner, Kwasi Amoako-Atta (Atiwa East Member of Parliament-cum-Board secretary), is offering less than Gh¢160.00 for each worker, for slaving for the company all these years, including 24 years of sitting on the dole.

In a ruling sometime in February 2013, the Appeals Court upheld an earlier ruling by the late Justice Nana Gyamera Tawiah’s High Court that submitted that, all 124 workers be paid their full entitlement as held by the collective bargaining agreement, inclusive of all other fringe benefits.

THE GHANAIAN SUN learned that the totality of the cash worked up to a little over ¢12 million (GH¢) including the supply of bales of cloth for each of the victorious 124, but the recalcitrant GTP is adamant and completely insensitive to the plight of the unfortunate workers.

That aside, the Appeals Court had ruled that each of the workers be paid a cost of ¢500.00 for their troubles, which then amounted to some ¢620,000. The ruling sent the soulless workers into a joyful frenzy for a short period of time, only for GTP to bounce back in a notorious form to under-pay.

In a crooked move to disturb the judgment and apparently rub salt into 124 cancerous sores, a couple of weeks ago, GTP, which now goes by the name Textiles, paid that insulting amount to Court, meaning that even the cost awarded has been slashed to a meaningless digit, not to talk of the end-of-service-benefit.

An earlier dragging of feet resulted in a Tema Court judge, Mrs. Laurenda Owusu, garnishing the company’s accounts with seven financial institutions in Accra and Tema. However, when lawyers for the company made an appeal to her ladyship that GTP’s business was hard hit as a result, the high-handedness was dropped and instead, an undertaking secured to ensure the workers were paid.

THE GHANAIAN SUN can state that the undertaking was arrived at when upon listening to lawyers from both ends, Justice Owusu (Mrs) sought the permission of the two feuding factions to contract the Institute of Chartered Accountants to work out the final determination, going by the barometer and formula spelt out by the last ruling.

Just outside the Tema High Court premises, public opinion was building to boiling points as several people failed to understand just why a labour attorney in the person of Mr. Aryeetey and his Member of Parliament-solicitor-partner, Amoako-Atta, could derive honour and pleasure in further humiliating what appears to be a jaded bunch of ex-workers, who can barely keep the heart and soul together.

One contributor, Naa Ayele Ghartey, a grand daughter of one of the unfortunate 124 workers, says she started following the case as far back as 1997, when she was in the JSS; was so bitter and alarmed that there still exists heartless people who remain oblivious of the suffering of those down the social ladder.

She told of two of the dead workers whose remains are in the Tema morgue and are due for burial sometime in the month, even though financial assistance to hold the funerals continue to remain much further than east is from the west.

It will be recalled that the landmark case had kick-started several years ago under the leadership of Andrews Kotey, a former deputy Supervisor Efficiency, Samuel Yamoah of the Clinic, Kpodonu Mensah also of Efficiency and Gideon Appiah Kubi of Maintenance all of GTP previously but somehow, by a twist of fate when judgment arrived 18 of the number had died.