The View From Inside Diageo: What’s Wrong With This Picture?
The View From Inside Diageo
The Diageo plant on the South Shore of St. Croix.
Something has got to be done about the heartless attitude against Crucians and Virgin Islanders by Diageo. I have a copy of the Diageo Orientation booklet with two Virgin Islanders in management. Teri Helenese is the Human Resources Director and Lorina Pickering Dyer is the Quality Manager. All the other blacks are hourly workers. Check the facts for yourself. Ask Diageo for a copy of the orientation book, you will see pictures for yourself of all the foreigners taxpayer money is going for.
This is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It took a few months to get this information but now there are employees on the inside that can shed the facts so the real deal on Diageo can be known by one and all.
Out of 1,000 (local) people at Diageo’s job fair, Diageo thinks the people of St. Croix and the Virgin Islands are so stchupid they had to relocate a twenty something year old man from Jamaica (and his family) to be the Operations Director. Taxpayer money is paying for his relocation to St. Croix and his 4 bedroom rental house in Judith’s Fancy, his Patriot Jeep, food, clothes and monthly trips back to Jamaica. Senators need to be up on what is really happening here in our islands and do something about it.
Forget the Judith’s Fancy digs. How much of taxpayer money is being used to pay for him over the time that he will be on the island? How long will he be on the island? Foreign relocations and visas cost between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. Diageo thinks Crucians are so dumb, they’d rather be insensitive and slap Crucians and Virgin Islanders on the island and abroad in the face and pay to relocate a Jamaican for $300,000 a year and not use what would be a fraction of the price to train a Crucian or Virgin Islander to do the job. Diageo could have even brought a Virgin Islander home from the States for less than $300,000 a year. Many people want to know just how much taxpayer money is paying for all these foreigners to be on our soil. This is senseless.
To add salt to the wound, Diageo relocated a man from Belfast, Northern Ireland as the Production Team Leader. Out of the 1,000 people at the job fair, Diageo thinks Crucians and Virgin Islanders are so stchupid they flew halfway across the globe and relocated at the average cost of $300,000 a year another Diageo employee and his family.
This time completely flying in the face of cultural sensitivity by hiring a white British man with an accent NOBODY understands to manage 20 black production operators. At $300,000 a year, he too lives in the posh Judith’s Fancy. This $300,000 of taxpayer money could have been used to train a Crucian for this position. A Crucian does not need a visa either.
To add hot pepper to the salt on the wound, of the 1,000 people at the job fair, Diageo relocated twenty year old woman, not twenty years of distillery and rum making experience, to be the Maturation Team Leader. This one is the biggest pappy show of all. Diageo thinks Crucians and Virgin Islanders are such monkeys and so stchupid we are as dumb as bats and do not have the smarts and intelligence to move barrels from the Renaissance site to the end of the airport road where all those barrels are stacked.
We were told this woman stood up in front of a Mr. David Cutter and David Gosnell who are Presidents at Diageo, during a professional presentation and talked about her boyfriend being in “Happy Land.” Her boyfriend is not in the military, but is on a self taken assignment in an undisclosed location as a civilian worker.
She told her Warehouse Operator team many days she will be sad and break down because she misses “Happy Land” so much, so just bear with her and don’t remind her about “Happy Land.” This lil gyal need a real lesson in how not to talk stchupidness to island people. We don’t give a s**t about her “Happy Land” boyfriend. This is the nonsense our people had to sit through that day and this is the nonsense taxpayer money is paying for. This is the nonsense Diageo relocated as a Maturation Team Leader over selecting a local for this job to move barrels from one site to another.
Out of the 1,000 people at the job fair, Diageo thinks Crucians are so stchupid they hired a man from Mobile, Alabama and relocated him to be the Maintenance Team Lead. More of our hard earned taxpayer money being put to bad use. He too has an all expense paid house in Judith’s Fancy. Senseless.
Crucians are so stchupid there is no one on the island that had the skill to be the MAINTENANCE Team Leader. Come on people. They would not even give us that. This is ridiculous!
Out of 1,000 people at the job fair, Diageo thinks Crucians are so stchupid they relocated another man and his family from Elgin, Scotland to be the Vice President of Operations. Vice President! I wonder what the price tag on a Vice President salary is.
Out of the 1,000 people at the job fair, Diageo thinks Crucians are so dumb, they relocated another twenty year old from Canada to be the Finance Manager. Not twenty years of finance experience, twenty something years old. Out of 1,000 people, Crucians on the island and in the states are so dumb they could not get a Finance Manager from the local labor pool, so they had to use $300,000 a year of taxpayer money to relocate another family to St. Croix.
Something has got to give. We the people need answers. All lawyers need to know the operation is a smokescreen. Every manager preaches the company is legally separated from the headquarters in Connecticut but this is not true. Connecticut makes all the rules and calls all the shots.
We the people of the Virgin Islands give Diageo a brand new free distillery and 30 to 60 years. They slap us in the face by hiring all these foreigners in high paying jobs and giving blacks the lower hourly pay instead of training Crucians and Virgin Islanders to be in management too. I want to know how many of these foreigners are interested in becoming residents. After they are naturalized, how many of them will register to vote in the Virgin Islands and truly be Virgin islanders. Not one of them! They don’t give two s**t about us! They are just in it for the big salary.
Labor Commissioner Albert Bryan, Jr. has done nothing because his friend Teri Helenese is the Human Resources director, a job given to her by Governor John deJongh. The choice came down to Carmelo Rivera and Teri Helenese. John (deJongh) chose Teri and put Carmelo in the Department of Planning and Natural Resources as the Assistant Commissioner. Why? Because if these puppets are young they must do what the deJongh-Francis Administration wants. Carmelo would never allow Diageo to bring in foreigners. He would stand up, fight for us and make sure the Legislature knows what Diageo is doing spending – $300,000.00 a pop to relocate employees from across the globe. He would stop it and send them home. The two local managers at Diageo don’t support the local workers. Senators stop sleeping at the wheel and do something about this injustice!
Diageo a bonanza? Only if they sell no rum outside the US, they make 20 million barrels every year (contract requires 2) and they hire 80% locals even if for the lesser jobs.
Herb, as a student if Reagan I am surprised you are not more familiar with the CBI as it pertains to rum tariffs, But I am glad to hear you say the deals sucks. And I agree that having rum companies here and being number one us the goal, but the tax breaks and the molasses subsidy made thus a bad deal, deJongh agrees because he removed the subsidy for overseas production when he photo Loire the deal to Cruzan
Vegan…That’s the point CBI and NAFTA can put Latin American, Caribbean and South American countries at a distinct advantage as long as we remain outside of the US Customs Zone. Puerto Rico is inside and we are not. So the near term answer is to create Free Trade Zones for our refinery and distilleries so we can have our cake and eat it to. This should enhance our commercial production while at the same time remove the useless excise tax burden from the backs of consumers. In Molloy v. GVI the federal courts determined that the U.S. Commerce Clause extends to the VI thus such taxes should be null and void anyway…such as personal use taxes have been determined to be.
Herb,
I want to hear about your proposal to fix deJongh’s dysfunctional 911-Communication System.
Herb, let me break it down. All rum coming into the US requires tariff. Under Reagan’s CBI, that rum is proportionately rebated to the territories if not made in the territories. So if Diageo had gone to Grenada we would still have gotten some cover over. Not as much as if it were made in st. Croix but without all of the bonds and tax breaks. So when these simpletons say “how can we lose what we didn’t have?” the answer is: giving up some of the cover over even though the percentage is high is not the problem. The problem is the $400 million to build the plant, the %100 exemption on local taxes, and the free unlimited molasses to foreign companies fir which we get no cover over. Can you defend these elements, Herb?
Sure Vegan: Jobs, jobs, jobs…are *here* and not in Grenada. These are not hamburger flipping minimum wage jobs but jobs were Virgin Islanders can make a good wage, build homes, send kids to college, spend there money here circulating in our economic development over and over. So while Diageo gets a tax break they are not exempt from paying a huge payroll to their local workers and some that money ends up in the V.I.Treasury.
As I said before, the consideration of this agreement eschewed being “penny wise and pound foolish.”
I was driving by Tutu mall this morning, and the majority of crewman working on the road are Hispanic and Caucasian. the governor promised that the majority of local people would be getting jobs. It is obviously that it is not the case. What is happenning at the Diageo plant is only an example of what is going on in this territory.
Herb – you are correct that they should bring in high level experts to train locals into higher level management positions. The issue is that they don’t bother to make the effort to train the locals for these positions because its too much for them to bother with.
Look,if the contract (and I’m assuming there is such a document) calls
for the training of locals for promotion to management positions,they can’t just refuse to abide by its provisions….simply because they can’t be ‘bothered’.
The governor can not dictate what a licensed contractors decides to hire outside of the labor laws of the Virgin Islands. The construction phase of the Diageo plant facilities was done by Benton Construction, a local Virgin Island company for over two decades, that had sufficient capitalization and bonding to satisfy the tender requirement for Diageo. Currently Diageo has been recruiting and training among local residents for high paying careers in the process operations and management.
Everyday dozens of non-documented residents gather as day laborers and jump in the back of pickup trucks to some contractors job site. why can’t this practice be curtailed according to the law? The real downer is that our labor unions are completely ineffective as the gatekeeper and protector of VI labor. If they were dong there job a contractor would need to see them first rather than never, the unions role should be the protection of their bother workers along with extensive apprenticeship training programs, legal protection, health insurance, and credit unions. Unfortunately here in the Virgin Islands unions are appendages of the Democrat Party apparatchik with the goals attached to political power rather than the protection of their rank and file.
Herb,Who said anything about the governor ‘dictating’ anything to anyone?
The Diageo contract has no requirement to hire any locals, Herb. First you say that Diageo shouldn’t hire locals in this climate then now you say that the benefit that we get from Diageo is jobs? Which is it? Just admit. It was a bum deal. Thank you for not refuting the CBI provisions or the fact that we have exposed our treasury to unlimited molasses subsidies for rum exported out of the US. Thank you Herb for not denying that we don’t just lose 45% of the cover over, but $400 million in building and land grants, and %100 tax breaks on 5 different taxes: income, property, gross receipts, excise etc. I invite you to google the” Bloomberg report June 2009 + Diageo + deJongh” where they basically call deJongh an idiot former Chase financier to have inked the deal.
“T” at 9:09 am today suggested the “governor promised the majority of those working would be “local” people. I hear the term “locals” used and it means different things to different people. In fact “locals” wasn’t even defined in any law nor in the draft constitution. The fact remains that many working as construction tradesmen are most likely not fitting that description. Day laborers should come under the jurisdiction of INS but this practice of hiring undocs is not enforced. Contractors with GVI, WMA. and PFA contracts using undocs could be persuaded to comply with their contract terms, but when is the last time you heard that done? How many of our senators have day laborers landscaping their estate or cutting grass, and painting? Yet even they do not seem to believe in the very laws they pass.
It is a complex problem that denies many young Virgin Islanders and chance to compete in the labor market. Many contractors complain that the only way they can get the job done is to import workers, and so it goes. I recall reading that the mass migration of workers from Viegues and Culebra to St. Croix in the past was their were jobs waiting for them that they were willing to do. For some reason, as I mentioned before, construction, operations, and some portions of
management should be under the watchful eye of trade unions.
Don’t expect government to do in this regard what the unions have fail to do here. What amazes me is still is how quickly a group of goal driven Santos can start up a business from scratch with little capital and make it an overnight success. Maybe we need them to teach us how? The seem to be able to get something going without the burdens of all the permits and licenses that stand in the “locals” way. They call it a “deferred licensing process”…so maybe that should be available to everyone.
@ Anonymous 12.52:
With all due respect,all ‘T’ said in his post was ‘the governor promised that the majority of local people would be getting jobs’….
that doesn’t sound like someone (the governor)’dictating’ anything to anyone to me.
……should have gone on to say that you are perfectly correct about the unions not being on the case and looking out for their rank-and- file dues-paying members.
Mario Moorhead just endorsed Foncie Indirectly .
How do you mean he endorsed him “indirectly”?
That finished Foncie for sure! why couldn’t Mario just keep his mouth shut rather than play with the listeners? Now Foncie is finished…..why why why. Foncie needed Marios endorsement like another teenage sex scandal!
anon 2:02-
Everyone knows that the case is not ONLY False but FAKE!! The girl said herself that she was paid by the Mongoose (Leslie) to make a confession. No one would touch this case with a 10 foot poll on STT therefore they had to take her over STX. Doesnt that seem fishy all in itself?
There is a lack of evidence and NO witnesses to the case and thats why it’s gone nowhere. Mario has MANY followers that just NEEDED the word and now they have it! To bad for you guys! You’ll be bawling with your “king” come tomorrow!! Good Riddance!
Donastorg/Baptiste 2010!!
I agree with the above message.
I anxious to PUSH , PUSH , PUSH #1.