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24 September, 2007
ICEM affiliate in Trinidad and Tobago, the Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU), staged a mass protest on 10 September over delays in bargaining between the union and the Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission. The union members’ protest came at the electric authority’s opening of a customer service centre at the company headquarters in Port-of-Spain.
Management was celebrating the opening of a new automatic meter infrastructure and the utility’s award of some TTD700 million in contracts for that system, as well as for a new power station. Much of that money will be used on contractors and contract labourers.
OWTU members, meanwhile, have been without a current collective agreement for over a year, and have been frustrated by salaries that are tied to 2005 levels at a time when Trinidad and Tobago’s inflation rate is high.
The last negotiations session was held in July, and the company’s chairman said management was waiting for direction from the Ministry of Public Utilities.
Meanwhile, another union in Trinidad and Tobago, the Public Service Association, staged another protest through a series of one-day work stoppages against the Water and Sewerage Authority. That occurred on 14 September, three days after a similar protest following a revised management proposal. Water and sewer workers are also protesting delays and a prolonged negotiations period. They are still attempting to resolve a 2005-2007 contract with the public utility, talks that only started in January 2007.
In a related workplace development in the country, five construction workers last week were hospitalised when they were overcome by gas at the state-owned Petrotrin’s Point-a-Pierre refinery. All 700 construction workers were forced to down tools by what Petrotrin said was a leak from an alkaline plant. It marked the second time in two months that building workers at the refinery walked from their jobs in protest to health and safety concerns.
Petrotrin is currently undergoing a gas optimisation modernisation, as well as a gas to liquids project at the west coast refinery. In early August, the state company dropped production by 15,000 barrels-per-day to 47,000 b/d due to safety concerns. That followed a May 2007 drop in crude production from offshore sites, after a gas explosion on an offshore rig in the Soldado field killed one contract worker, and injured two others.