Soft drink man­u­fac­tur­er SM Jaleel has re­duced the salaries and hours of work of some em­ploy­ees at its plant at the Ota­heite In­dus­tri­al Es­tate in South Oropouche as it makes ad­just­ments dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

In ad­di­tion to slash­ing the base salaries of the af­fect­ed work­ers, they work hours have been re­duced from eight to sev­en Mon­days to Fri­days and five hours on Sat­ur­days.

Ac­cord­ing to a memo dat­ed April 16 and signed by the com­pa­ny’s Vice Pres­i­dent Hu­man Re­sources Zaid Cas­sim, the mea­sures will be in place for the pe­ri­od April to Ju­ly 2020, af­ter which there will be a re­view.

Cas­sim, who thanked the af­fect­ed work­ers for their “un­der­stand­ing, sup­port and agree­ment” to the tem­po­rary ad­just­ments, added: “We are con­fi­dent that by putting God first and by be­ing one an­oth­er’s keep­er, we will come out of this glob­al cri­sis stronger than ever.”

Asked for com­ment on the mat­ter yes­ter­day, SM Jaleel in­stead sent out a press re­lease say­ing its re­gion­al ex­ports had been se­vere­ly im­pact­ed due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly in is­lands which are de­pen­dent on cruise ship tourism.

As a re­sult, the com­pa­ny said there have been con­sul­ta­tions on salary re­duc­tions and lay-off of staff in its ex­port lo­gis­tics and ex­port man­u­fac­tur­ing de­part­ments.

Com­pa­ny of­fi­cials did not say how many work­ers have been af­fect­ed by the cuts but said since the cri­sis, new de­part­ments had been cre­at­ed to al­low cus­tomers to ac­cess prod­ucts from the safe­ty of their homes.

SM Jaleel al­so high­light­ed health and well­ness mea­sures at all their fa­cil­i­ties, in­clud­ing tem­per­a­ture test­ing, hand wash­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion of masks and work­ing from home. The com­pa­ny said it has al­so pro­vid­ed a spe­cial trav­el al­lowance to front­line work­ers do­ing sales, de­liv­er­ies and mer­chan­dis­ing.

The largest man­u­fac­tur­er of non-al­co­holic drinks in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, SM Jaleel’s prod­ucts are found in more half a mil­lion whole­sale and re­tail stores world­wide, in­clud­ing Wal­mart and oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al re­tail­ers. The com­pa­ny has more than 2,000 em­ploy­ees on five con­ti­nents.