This is a difficult time to abide by precedent in industrial relations, especially when the closure of business activities, partially or completely, has led to the termination of the employment of hundreds of workers.

They are being terminated not because of indiscipline or shoddy performance or because of attitudinal malfeasance, but simply because of a government edict, related to the possibility that they might have, in their bloodstreams, a strain of the covid19 virus.

So to prevent the possible overcrowding of hospitals, any business not regarded as “essential” has been mandated to close, on and off for a year and a half.

There is a sad and touching hope in the hearts of many people who have to provide for children, parents and unemployed siblings that when everybody gets two doses of one of the available strains of vaccine that everything will go back to “normal” – which we all know will never be what pre-lockdown business, commerce and employment was.

Although their own manufacturers claim that their vaccines are only effective for maybe a year, maybe two, that viral epidemics will inevitably be part of our lives for the foreseeable future (giving the vaccine-manufacturing industries a bright market future) and that even the double doses are no guarantee against reinfection, there are lingering hopes.

Thankfully what the vaccine drive can do, we hope, is to change the pace at which government understands people's needs, and that more studies will give evidence that even without 70 per cent "herd" coverage, they will enable people to travel again, Caribbean Airlines to keep a few of its pilots, and – hope against hope – allow schools to open for children whose essential developmental brain stages have been bypassed. For some reason schooling was not regarded as essential when decisions were made.

There is a “second wave” of retrenchments taking place now, even as government is allowing construction workers to resume work.

Those failing businesses that have managed to remain open up till now, scraping by as “mostly essential,” are beginning to close down as they are no longer being asked to provide goods and services even to long-time customers who were classified among the non-essentials.

Queries are coming in from desperate employers who first put employees on vacation leave earned, then on a layoff at half-pay for the first three months of the pandemic shutdowns, in accordance with standard Ministry of Labour layoff guidelines, in good faith, although no work was being done and no money being earned.

Then for the next six months the wages of non-working employees shrank to a quarter pay, with still no money coming in to pay them, until there simply was no more money to pay out, and the questions now are not whether to retrench or not to retrench but:

1) How do we calculate severance pay? On the quarter wages they are now earning, or the full original wages they used to get, and what they now are claiming we must pay?

2) W