A years-long fight for workplace justice has wrapped up with a landmark win for 44 laid-off workers at Berger Paints Barbados, who will receive long-overdue reparations for proven anti-union discrimination plus a retroactive 12% salary increase set to take effect in January 2025. The resolution was finalized this week after weeks of tense three-party negotiations between the Barbados Workers Union (BWU), the island’s Department of Labour, and ANSA McAL Group — the Trinidad-based conglomerate that owns Berger Paints Barbados.
BWU General Secretary Toni Moore made the victory public during the union’s annual Family and Picnic Affair, hosted Friday at Barbados’ National Botanical Gardens. Moore outlined that beyond the agreed 12% pay raise starting 2025, the former workers will also receive 16 months of backpay adjusted to reflect the new wage scale, plus reparations that close the financial gap created by the company’s discriminatory policy. All existing severance packages will also be recalculated to incorporate the higher wage, boosting the final payouts for every affected worker.
Moore emphasized that this outcome was only possible through the union’s unwavering persistence on behalf of its members, most of whom spent an average of two decades as employees of Berger Paints before the facility shut down. The discriminatory practice at the center of the dispute was first uncovered by BWU organizers in 2022: a company-wide performance incentive scheme that approved bonuses for non-union staff who passed performance reviews, but explicitly excluded all workers who were registered members of the BWU.
The urgency of resolving the claim ramped up after Berger Paints Barbados ceased operations, leaving the former workers without access to workplace remedies while they waited for negotiations to conclude. After multiple weeks of meetings and a formal audit of company financial records conducted by the Department of Labour to verify the union’s claim, ANSA McAL finally conceded to the BWU’s demands.
“Yesterday at our meeting, we were able to get the company to agree that wherever the discrimination was meted out to the workers at Berger on account of them being union members, that reparation will be done and they will close that gap,” Moore told attendees at the picnic.
Unfortunately, the win was not replicated in parallel negotiations with another recently closed ANSA McAL subsidiary, Standards Distributors Limited. Moore noted that the BWU’s membership at the distribution firm was extremely small, and the union’s efforts to secure improved severance terms for workers as the company shut its doors ultimately failed.
Despite that setback, Moore used the announcement to urge all union members across Barbados to remain vocal and hold both employers and union leadership accountable when they suspect unfair treatment in the workplace, emphasizing that collective persistence is the only path to securing working justice.