Worker treatment at Ephelia Hotel goes from bad to worse
Treatment of staff at the Ephelia Resort in Port Launay has gone from bad to worse right under the very nose of the Ministry of Employment and will no doubt be reflected in the voting boxes against the ruling party as well as the opposition LDS.We have published many articles over the years to try and pressure the top management and the owners of the Ephelia Resort to treat the Seselwa local workers with dignity and respect. And now it’s reached even junior expatriate workers who have been made redundant are being asked to pay for their own return airfares and their own PCR tests for Covid-19.
The Ministry of Employment is in total cahoots with the establishment at Ephelia and they have not moved an inch to try and rectify the deficiencies in staff management, especially when it comes to enforcing the localization programme at the Ephelia, which is supposed to be a requirement. This situation at the big hotels in Seychelles will lose the US many votes at the next presidential election, even if Minister Loustau-Lallanne tried his best recently to do some “too little too late” damage control in the National Assembly on the eve of being nominated as Danny Faure’s running mate. The LDS on its part have also failed to exert the necessary pressure which was expected of them to achieve a positive result in this fight against the perpetrators. Instead they just paid lip service to the workers’ cause and have tried to fool the electorate into believing that they were doing something, while they were also being wined and dined away from the prying eyes.
What the US and LDS haven’t done in four years in office they will not do in the next five.
It will be business as usual in the tourism industry for the foreign owners and their management if you waste your votes on Danny or Wavel. They will start shedding crocodile tears after this article because the truth hurts and it will also hurt their egoistic persona. Following our last article in regards to Ephelia in our Edition No. 22 dated 13th July, 2020. This newspaper have been inundated with phone calls, text messages and various other forms communication from the Ephelia staff and elsewhere.The core complaints are mostly the same, which is about the ill-treatment of staff at the bigger hotels and it is not just from Seychellois employee. Many lower rank expat workers have also called this newspaper to complain that they are treated like slaves by the expatriate bosses. Ephelia keeps coming up as the worst offender out of the lot. It has been reported to this newspaper that the GM doesn’t even treat his own people from Mauritius with any respect. In fact they are abused in an extreme manner due to the fact that they are not at home and need to keep that job to feed their families overseas. They are threatened with termination of their contracts if they refuse to do jobs that are outside their scope of work. It was particularly painful for these workers during the lockdown period when the Seychellois had to stay at home. The food was of a very low standard.
The biggest dilemma now for the expatriate workers who are being made redundant is that the Ephelia management; the GM in particular is burdening and applying big pressure on them to pay for the second leg of their own airfares to go back home. And to add insult to injury they want the workers to fork out another SCR6000 to pay for COVID-19 (CPR) tests so that they can be accepted onboard the aircraft and at their destination. This is a serious abuse onthese people with the full backing of The Ministry of Employment. Where are Jean Weeling, Glenny Savy and Guy Adam don’t they have a heart for these poor workers?
