MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, By WiredJa Staff  •  February 19, 2026  • They checked tourists in while their own homes were flooding. They served breakfast while the storm tore through their communities. They stayed because the job demanded it — and because, for workers living contract to contract, you don't say no.

Now, months after Hurricane Melissa, hundreds of those same workers sit at home in silence, waiting on a phone call that may never come. Not because they performed poorly. Not because the hotels won't reopen. But because a system engineered to deny them rights has finally shown its full cruelty.

Opposition Spokesperson for Tourism and Linkages, Ms. Andrea Purkiss, MP, is done waiting for government to notice.

"Up to ninety percent of Jamaica's hotel workers are employed on rolling short-term contracts of three, six, or twelve months — a deliberate strategy used by large, overseas-based hotel operators to prevent workers from qualifying for the employment protections guaranteed under the Employment (Termination and Redundancy Payments) Act of 1974."

— Andrea Purkiss, MP, Opposition Spokesperson for Tourism and Linkages

The mechanism is as calculated as it is cynical. Between contracts, workers are handed "contract breaks" — artificial gaps inserted specifically to reset the legal clock on their statutory rights. On paper, their employment history reads as a series of short engagements. In reality, many have served the same property for years, sometimes decades. The law sees the fiction. The workers live the truth.

"These are not flexible working arrangements," Purkiss said flatly. "They are a legal trap."

Hurricane Melissa Did Not Create This Crisis. It Revealed It.

The storm has forced into the open what labour advocates have long argued behind closed doors. Workers whose hurricane-era contracts simply won't be renewed have no legal ground on which to stand — not because their service was insufficient, but because their employer's paperwork was designed to ensure they never accumulated enough continuous employment to trigger redundancy protections.

The injustice, Purkiss argues, runs deeper than job loss. Because their employment history is technically a sequence of broken contracts, many workers cannot properly claim NIS benefits they have faithfully contributed to. They cannot qualify for bank loans. They cannot secure a mortgage.

"They have built Jamaica's most valuable export industry. They cannot build a home of their own."

— Andrea Purkiss, MP

That line is not rhetoric. It is arithmetic. And it is damning.

The Call to Government

Purkiss is directing her demands squarely at two ministers: the Honourable Pearnel Charles Jr., Minister of Labour and Social Security, and the Honourable Edmund Bartlett, Minister of Tourism. Her asks are specific and legislative.

Purkiss's Legislative Demands

  • Amend employment law to recognise continuity of service based on the actual working relationship — not the contractual architecture constructed to evade it.
  • Review NIS regulations to protect workers whose contribution records have been artificially disrupted by engineered contract breaks.
  • Engage financial institutions directly to address the credit exclusion that flows from a broken employment classification system.

"The relevant legislation must be amended," she said. "Jamaica's tourism workers have served this industry and this country with distinction. They deserve the full protection of our laws — not a system engineered to deny it to them."

The Political Stakes

There is a broader question here that neither minister can comfortably avoid. Jamaica's tourism product is sold globally on the promise of warm, exceptional, people-centred hospitality. That product is delivered — entirely — by the workers this system has been designed to keep precarious.

If the government chooses silence, it becomes complicit in that design. If it acts, it has the opportunity to do something genuinely historic: close a legal loophole that has allowed overseas hotel operators to extract maximum value from Jamaican labour while insulating themselves from the obligations that Jamaican law was written to impose.

Purkiss is putting the question on the table with the sharpness it deserves.

The contract breaks were always artificial. The workers' contributions were always real. It is long past time the law reflected that.