5 October, 2009
ICEM affiliate Oilfields Workers’ Trade Union (OWTU) of Trinidad and Tobago issued a dire warning last week to the government to stop trampling union rights and threats to full-time employment at state-owned energy concerns.
At a mass meeting at OWTU headquarters in San Fernando on 1 October, President-General Ancel Roget said a week-long national strike, led by the country’s most powerful trade union, is imminent by the end of the year if the government and its enterprises do not stop the abuse.
The island-nation has been gripped of late by government enterprises, the Telecommunications Service (TSTT) and the Public Transport Service Corp. (PTSC), taking legal action to decertify trade unions in those sectors because of labour incidents this summer.
OWTU members last week
Photo: Trevor Hackett/Trinidad and Tobago Express
Late last week, just prior to a mass gathering outside the industrial court to protest the union decertifications, the Trade and Industry Minister, upon exiting from a cabinet meeting, said ministers would instruct the state enterprises to drop court actions aimed at decertifying the Communication Workers’ Trade Union and the Transport and Industrial Workers’ Trade Union.
That was seen as a tangible retreat by the government to growing discontent by citizens angered by suppression of trade union rights in the public sector.
But despite this, OWTU is waiting for the government and administrators of state-controlled oil and gas companies Petrotrin and Trinmar (Petrotrin’s offshore subsidiary) to back away from rhetoric that discredits its full-time workforce. The government has made claims that the energy companies are overstaffed by 2,000 workers, and that retrenchments might be inevitable.
OWTU President-General Ancel Roget
OWTU also takes offense to statements made by Petrotrin Chairman Malcolm Jones before a parliamentary committee meeting early last week. At a Public Accounts Committee meeting, Jones said Petrotrin’s permanent workforce at its Point-à-Pierre refinery was not performing well enough during a gasoline optimization project, thus forcing the company to hire temporary and contract workers at the refinery.
At last Thursday’s emergency OWTU meeting, Roget called for an audit of the gasoline optimization programme, and said workers face “a runaway government” intent on imposing “all kinds of penalties and hardships for the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago.”
The government’s union decertification retreat in telecommunications and transport appears aimed at defusing possible mass unrest and mobilizations during the 27-29 November biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Port of Spain.
But the government of Prime Minister Patrick Manning may face those protests anyway if Petrotrin and its bosses do not stand down from its demoralizing anti-worker rhetoric that has clearly irritated Trinidad and Tobago’s paramount trade union.