According to Sun.mv workers of Alimatha went on strike after the management decided to terminate two workers who sent a petition to the management to increase their pay. Alimatha is one of the most beautiful resorts in Felidhu atoll and the clientele are mostly repeaters. It belongs to the old bad category of resorts where generally workers are expected to live and work hard… quite a different situation from modern big brand resorts which pay good wages and service charge.
In theory it ought to be about planning the work for the day; about passing relevant information to the workers for the day, but in practice its very different. Although most resorts do not employ the procedure of morning briefings, some better managed resorts do. The idea is of course to focus the work. However it’s also the chance for the supervisors or middle managers to do a little bit of showing off and impress upon the workers who is the boss around. It maybe a side effect of bad upbringing or a sign of inferiority complex but it’s very prevalent in resort life. Maybe we need better talent up there where it counts.
We have had reports of supervisors doing briefing for a full hour in some resorts, just making it a long long rant going over the same thing. Also the general idea to conduct briefings does not somehow seems to be known by those who do that. In some such briefings the sequence goes like this
· Find fault with somebody and start attacking him/her.
· Inform tid bits of useful info to the work for the day
· Go a long rant about how he (supervisor/manager) came to this position.
It’s a sure way of demoralizing workers by these things while some senior managements are not aware of the drudgery their workers struggle with. Of course life has ups and downs but most resort workers are keeping up just with things like this on a daily basis to survive in the workplace.
For the first time in a very long long time, the words ‘job creation’ has been mentioned in an election pledge. We have in a previous post mentioned about jobs being a non-issue in our politics. But this seems to be changing now. Of course election pledges are just empty words and most rational people do not believe in the flowery language. But the fact that job creation is at least mentioned now is an improvement. The promised figure is 26k and way they would go about doing that according to PPM would be by inviting more investors and building more resorts. This is of course easier said than done. Our tourism industry has grown up from humble beginnings to ludicrously expensive industry in a recession prone world. In today’s standard, there simply is very little space except for the rich guests. The resorts are designed just for the rich, not for the budget traveler. What cost 5m to build today costs anything over 50m in the space of roughly 20 years. Attracting that kind of investors would be a challenge especially when a healthy opposition is hell bent on thwarting the administration on everything. The saddest part of this political drama is when opposition started calling to boycott our tourism industry and the effects of their negative campaign were felt. There simply has to be a way to do politicking without damaging the economy.
Another useful nugget of information from the Yageen Team was their belief that oil exploration will be renewed, if they basically had their way. There was an attempt to test for oil exploration roughly 20 years ago and it was stopped some years for some reason. The reason we now understand is that it was not feasible at 20$ per barrel at that time. Now that a barrel costs 125% it would be feasible.
Coming from politicians there is little reason to be overjoyed with these prospects. They have a reason to make pledges and promises and we have a reason to be judicial on whether to take their pledges at face value or not.
https://maldivesresortworkers.wordpress.com/resorts/club-faru/
Tourism ministry has take over Club Faru after the management has failed to handover the island to the ministry after their lease period is over. This island has been planned to be included with the Hulhumale in the second phase of Hulhumale development project. The arrangements were finalized in 2005 and a temporary license was issued to the island to operate since then, for each year. The owners of the island were also given another island as compensation for the island. At the time the ministry has taken over the island, there were 55 tourists and the ministry has announced that it will run the island in the interim period.
Maldives Resort Workers 