Hotel sector Joint Union wants service charge added to basic

Rasika SOMARATHNA

A Joint Committee Union of hotel sector employees are planning to request the government to consider amalgamating their service charge earnings to their salaries and subject to EPF, ETF in order to ensure better returns to the members on retirement.

In addition, a request is also to be made to ensure that employees working on contract basis are integrated into the permanent cadre, after satisfactory performance during a stipulated period.

This was revealed to the media after the formation of the Sri Lanka Nidahas Sevaka Sangamaya Hotel Sector Joint committee on Tuesday.

SLNSS, Secretary Lesley Devendra addressing the media said, that currently a major share of the earnings made by hotel sector employees were in the form of payments made on service charges.

Thus he argued it was an injustice when EPF and ETF are computed on the basic salary which is very low in the case of hotel employees.

Several hotel employees also said that they were facing difficulties when obtaining loans and other financial facilities from Banks also due to their low basic salary. Calling it as a unique problem concerning hotel sector, Devendra said that the newly formed committee would request the government to provide a viable solution to the problem.

He said that the aim of such social security schemes were to assure financial stability to the employees in the winter of their lives and to reward them for their role in the economic growth of the country and added that hotel employees should not be left behind in this regard. Speaking on the aim of forming such a joint committee Devendra said that there were some common problems facing hotel sector employees as a whole and it was important to have one voice in order to find viable solutions to them.

Also Devendra said that it has the right time to form such a committee with tourism sector approaching its golden era, since the end of terrorism in the country.

He said that Sri Lanka's target of 750,000 tourists by the end of the year had been achieved by the month of November and added that this was ample testimony to the growth of the sector in recent times. He said that Sri Lanka expects tourist arrivals to increase to 2.5 million by 2016 and the sector could eventually become the country's largest foreign revenue earner.

Thus he pointed out that it was important to upgrade hotels and build new ones to meet the growing demand. In this context it was also important to keep hotel employees content and happy in order to increase their efficiency. He also pointed out that the human element played a key role in the hospitality industry where the quality of service to the customer was of utmost importance.

On the formation of the joint committee Devendra said that a large number of hotels were already with them. He also invited employees from all grade of hotels within Colombo city and outstations to join them. The inaugural meeting on Tuesday was attended by employee representatives from some of the major five star hotels in the city, such as Hilton, Taj, Galle Face, Continental, Grand Oriental, Waters Edge, Cinnamon Grand and others.