Builders hail foreign construction workers’ benefits, slam ‘mafia’

Santo Domingo.- Dominican Housing Buildersand Developers Association (Acoprovi) president Hector Breton on Tuesday thankedpresident Danilo Medina and the heads of the Labor Ministry, the National SocialSecurity Council and the Social Security Treasury for their efforts to secure SocialSecurity benefits for foreign construction workers, long stymied by a "mafia".

"In ACOPROVI we’ve spent years fightingfor foreign workers to get occupational risk insurance, health and pensions,and this will be possible thanks to the enactment of National Social Security CouncilResolution 377-02 and Executive order 96- 16," Breton said.

He said the Social Security Treasury (TSS) isnow authorized to register foreign workers, especially of Haitians registeredin the National Plan to Regularize Foreigners. "Every construction workerwill now have their individual pension fund account; every worker will knowwhat they can count on for their old age."

Breton added that some labor unions hadopposed the measure for a long time, "to justify the mafia represented bythe so-called Construction Workers Pension Fund (FOPETCONS), a distribution fundthat "what it did was encourage corruption."