wake of Friday's strike.

But the Bermuda Industrial Union feels any amendments should wait until present disputes are resolved.

Labour and Home Affairs Minister the Hon. Irving Pearman has said he will review Bermuda's labour laws in light of Friday's one-day partial work stoppage.

"Clearly it is not working effectively,'' he said of the present legislation.

Mr. John Harvey, executive director of the Hotel Employers of Bermuda, said the Labour Relations Amendment Act 1991 was presumably intended to prevent strikes in the hotel industry. "Obviously, that has not been effective,'' he said.

The Act created the Essential Industries Disputes Settlement Board, which has ruled three times on the dispute which was cited in Friday's work stoppage.

Bermuda needed "stability'' in the hotel industry, and that had to be built on "a very effective grievance procedure mechanism,'' Mr. Harvey said.

Hoteliers did not want a situation in which employees' response to discipline against a worker could be to "just walk off the job,'' in an attempt to pressure management, he said.

Mr. Ottiwell Simmons MP, president of the BIU, said yesterday the union was still deciding whether to appeal Friday night's Supreme Court decision which declared that day's Island-wide hotel strike illegal.

Mr. Simmons said the BIU called the strike because hoteliers were withholding more than $1 million in tips that belonged to workers. The HEB says that three consecutive Essential Industries Dispute Settlement Boards have upheld the hoteliers' position on disputed gratuities.

Smaller HEB hotels have cited the 1991 legislation in refusing to sign the current union contract. They say it would bind them to the union forever.

"This whole mess should be cleared up before they touch that legislation,'' Mr. Simmons said.

He believed the only change hoteliers wanted was one that would "do away with the union.'' The problem was the HEB trying to "terminate'' its collective agreement and relationship with the BIU, he said.

A June 23, 1991 critique of the Labour Relations Amendment Act 1991 by HEB lawyer Mr. Alan Dunch said hoteliers did not object to a statutory scheme for resolving disputes in the industry, but the HEB was "wholly opposed'' to having contracts imposed by a third party.

And the law did "nothing to resolve the very real problem which has plagued the HEB over the last decade, namely the unnotified (and in most cases unwarranted) withdrawal of labour and the resulting economic loss,'' Mr. Dunch wrote.

The existence of a statutory scheme for resolving disputes "could well result in the demise of collective bargaining on the part of the BIU,'' Mr. Dunch wrote. Because terms of an existing contract would remain in place until a new contract was reached, there would be particularly little incentive for the union to negotiate when hoteliers were seeking concessions.

Rather than prohibiting industrial action during the life of a contract, the legislation anticipated such action. "It is arguably a ... fundamental (and perhaps fatal) flaw ... that it does not make illegal the use of strikes or other irregular industrial action ... during the life of a collective agreement,'' he wrote.

The Trade Disputes Act 1992, which created a Trade Disputes Tribunal and was brought in as a result of the Bermuda Forwarders dispute, is also opposed by the BIU.

Mr. Harvey said it appeared to have "more teeth,'' but he had not studied it because it was not brought in specifically to deal with the hotel industry.