HOTEL MANAGER ACCUSED OF ATTACKING WORKERS

The British manager of a hotel in the southern Mozambican tourist resort of Vilankulo has been accused of beating three of his Mozambican workers. The incident occurred on 18 April during celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Vilankulo being raised to the status of a town. The hotel workers received a phone call from the airport from visitors wishing to obtain rooms. “When they arrived we allocated rooms to them”, the workers said. They saw nothing wrong with this, since the raison d’etre of a hotel is to provide travelers with rooms. There was no need to inform the general manager, since the hotel has a reception manager, responsible for arranging accommodation.  But when the general manager, Simon Armor, arrived, he demanded to know who had given the new guests rooms. Aware of the manager’s irritable temper, at first they said nothing.Then, according to the workers, after shouting at them in the reception, Armor took them into his office, locked the door and began to beat them. “Mozambicans are worthless”, Armor is alleged to have shouted. “That day the head of the reception knew that we would accommodate certain guests. But the general manager did not wait for reports from department heads. There was no need for him to intervene”, said one of the workers. “He should have waited for the report from the head of reception to know what had happened. Based on that, he could have acted, but without hitting us”.The three workers took the case to the police, but when, after a few days, the police took no action, the resorted to the District Attorney’s office, with a note provided by the trade union committee at the hotel. The three have been working at the hotel since December 2013. They said that since then, Armor has sacked about 20 workers with no good cause. But when AIM contacted Armor over the phone, he denied all the workers’ accusations. Speaking through his assistant, Gino Andrade, he said there was no truth in the workers’ claims. There had been no beatings, and he had just taken the workers into his office to speak with them. Andrade said he had been a witness to this, although the workers claim he was not in the hotel that day.In early May, the Inhambane Provincial Director of Labour, Joao Almeida, told AIM that investigations confirmed the violent attack by Armor on the three workers. He said Armor had eventually admitted the attack, and the case was now with the courts.