Cig­a­rette man­u­fac­tur­er West In­di­an To­bac­co Com­pa­ny Ltd (Wit­co) an­nounced yes­ter­day that it signed a new col­lec­tive agree­ment with the Sea­men and Wa­ter­front Work­ers’ Trade Union (SWW­TU) to pro­vide a six per cent wage in­crease for work­ers of the com­pa­ny.

In a news re­lease, Wit­co con­firmed it fi­nalised col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing agree­ments with a six per cent wage in­crease for both hourly rat­ed work­ers and month­ly rat­ed staff on Fri­day, Ju­ly 28, 2023.

The sign­ing took place at the Lucky Strike Red and White Rooms at Wit­co’s head of­fice, Champs Fleurs, the re­lease said.

The par­ties’ ne­go­ti­a­tion teams were led by Wit­co’s head of HR Op­er­a­tions Leah Ish­mael-Lynch and head of HR Caribbean, Luke Git­tens, as well as SWW­TU pres­i­dent gen­er­al Michael An­nisette and branch chair­man Ri­car­do Hack­ett.

Ne­go­ti­a­tions oc­curred over two months of mean­ing­ful and re­spect­ful en­gage­ment. The col­lec­tive agree­ment cov­ers the pe­ri­od 2023 to 2025.

“We are com­mit­ted to en­sur­ing fair com­pen­sa­tion and em­ploy­ee sat­is­fac­tion and re­ten­tion as this is cru­cial for busi­ness sus­tain­abil­i­ty,” said Wit­co man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, Raoul Glynn, said.

“The ne­go­ti­a­tions were trans­par­ent, re­spect­ful, based on com­pre­hen­sive da­ta and our very com­pet­i­tive po­si­tion­ing in the mar­ket. The agree­ment is in keep­ing with the cur­rent so­cioe­co­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment of our coun­try and the com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to en­sure the best ben­e­fits are avail­able to em­ploy­ees and Wit­co con­tin­ues to be a great place to work,” said Glynn.

The ne­go­ti­a­tions were fo­cused on bal­anc­ing ad­just­ments in both wages and ben­e­fits. This was in­clu­sive of, but not lim­it­ed to en­hance­ments in health ben­e­fits, as well as grad­ual in­creas­es in al­lowances and pre­mi­ums.

An­nisette said that the add-ons agreed made the deal es­pe­cial­ly ben­e­fi­cial to work­ers.

“There are oth­er add-ons with­in the six per cent and giv­en the cli­mate, the Wit­co fi­nan­cials as you know it is with­in the pub­lic do­main that we be­lieve that where we are in terms of the in­dus­try norm that the 6 per cent was rea­son­able with­in the cir­cum­stances,” said An­nisette.

“We were al­so able to touch on oth­er is­sues that are crit­i­cal to the mem­ber­ship.”

He added that agree­ments con­cern­ing sev­er­ance and in­cen­tive pay­ments were al­so agreed in ad­di­tion to oth­er ben­e­fits that would help work­ers in the cur­rent eco­nom­ic cli­mate.

“There is al­so a ques­tion of food vouch­ers, which we be­lieve is cre­ative and in­no­v­a­tive. It is to al­low work­ers to ben­e­fit from food vouch­ers eg my food vouch­er is $500 and that is $500 not com­ing out of my base salary and that in it­self is an in­crease. So what we sought to do as the union is to look at new met­rics in terms of how work­ers can ben­e­fit and not nec­es­sar­i­ly just the straight across the board wage in­crease.”

In its six-month, unau­dit­ed fi­nan­cials for the pe­ri­od end­ed June 30, 2023, Wit­co de­clared af­ter-tax prof­it of $102. 16 mil­lion, which was 33 per cent less than for the same pe­ri­od in 2022.

The com­pa­ny’s rev­enue for the pe­ri­od Jan­u­ary 1 to June 30, 2023 was $306.96 mil­lion, a de­cline of 20.1 per cent com­pared with the same pe­ri­od in 2022.

In her chair’s re­view of the six-month in­ter­im re­sult, In­grid Lash­ley said: The sec­ond quar­ter record­ed growth trends in both do­mes­tic and ex­port vol­ume, which is re­flect­ed in a 46 per cent in­crease in net turnover over the first quar­ter. This pro­vides as­sur­ance that re­cent in­vest­ments in the trans­for­ma­tion of the port­fo­lio is pos­i­tive­ly chang­ing the land­scape while con­tin­u­ing to de­liv­er val­ue for mon­ey via new cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ences, in­no­va­tion and con­sis­ten­cy in qual­i­ty.”