By DANA SMITH

Tribune Staff Reporter

dsmith@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Electricity Corporation has slashed its monthly average of $1 million in overtime pay by 50 per cent, according to corporation chairman Leslie Miller.

He explained yesterday that at one point, individual workers were sometimes receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime pay, but the bill is now down to a total of half a million dollars per month, as BEC continues to streamline expenses.

“You all have heard me talk a lot about the overtime situation at BEC which use to be to the tune of $12 million per annum for the last several years,” Mr Miller said.

“We are reducing that as much as we can. I think we are now down to less than half a million dollars per month, where it was up to a million a month – and in one case it went to $1.5 million a month in overtime.”

Calling the overtime situation at BEC “a serious problem,” the chairman added: “As I said in parliament, people go to jail for thieving but BEC, they call it overtime.”

As reported in The Tribune earlier, workers were sometimes receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime pay – which Prime Minister Perry Christie had criticised as excessive when he spoke of plans to hire more workers to “share responsibilities” for the overtime needs.

Last December, Mr Miller told The Tribune that BEC was on the brink of collapse as a result of paying a handful of employees millions in overtime. In total $2,393,152.99 was paid to just 10 employees.

He said yesterday: “It is the board’s view and the minister’s view that it must cease and desist. The honourable minister Philip “Brave” Davis, our minister responsible for BEC, has made it clear that the goal of BEC at the present time is to reduce overtime from $12 million and we’re working very hard with management, towards that end.

“You can appreciate it’s not going to be easy to do when you’re trying to trim $10 million off their budget and when I say their budget, I mean out their pockets. It will be a very difficult challenge for us.”

Nothing that BEC has spend around $57 million in salaries to its 1,000 employees, Mr Miller also spoke of another cost-saving initiatives that will affect workers - employees will have to contribute to their pension plan.

“Because of the incentives that BEC offers, and because the pressure really is not that great on people who work for BEC, it’s an organisation that’s probably second to none in benefits for its workers and I mean that with all seriousness,” he said.

“We pay 100 per cent of your medical plan which costs BEC $6 million per year, we have $157 million in the pension fund which BEC pays all of – that’s going to change, very shortly, where the contribution is made by the employees as well as the employer.

“You are the employers, remember. In other words you’re giving them a free lunch, even though you don’t get a free breakfast, free lunch, free dinner, free snack and everything else.

“So we’re trying to bring them in line with the rest of society; that what is good for them must be good for all of us. “What is tough for us should be tough for them also. So if we catching hell they should be catching hell also.

“We’re just making some changes. Again, you’ll probably hear plenty noise from the union as time goes by during the course of the summer.”