Yvonne Ba­boolal

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers Union (CWU) has warned it will be soon start­ing a po­lit­i­cal cam­paign against the Gov­ern­ment be­cause of al­leged po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in its is­sues with the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT).

CWU pres­i­dent, Joseph Re­my, in an in­ter­view last week re­called that at Labour Day cel­e­bra­tions in Fyz­abad on June 19 ear­li­er this year, the union had an­nounced its plan to join civ­il so­ci­ety groups to form a van­guard move­ment to seek bet­ter gov­er­nance in T&T. "We're go­ing to start hold­ing pub­lic fo­rums at var­i­ous lo­ca­tions very soon to ed­u­cate peo­ple on the Gov­ern­ment's ac­tions against the work­ing class and trade unions," Re­my said.

"There is a plan by the Gov­ern­ment to break all unions that are car­ry­ing an in­de­pen­dent line and that are not aligned to them po­lit­i­cal­ly." Re­my said since 1976, the CWU had been car­ry­ing an in­de­pen­dent line. "And, since then, we have been sub­ject to at­tacks from the Gov­ern­ment. "We're not Com­mu­nists and we're not just do­ing this to force the Gov­ern­ment to give us what we want. We just have a deep so­cial con­science." Re­my said the CWU was ex­pect­ing a back­lash from the Gov­ern­ment over their po­lit­i­cal cam­paign. "We're ex­pect­ing the heavy arm of the State, like what we got on Ju­ly 7 at TSTT's of­fice. And we're ex­pect­ing them to frus­trate most of our col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing."

'It's col­lu­sion'

The CWU is con­vinced that there was some lev­el of col­lu­sion be­tween agents in the hi­er­ar­chy of the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) and TSTT of­fi­cials to cause a de­lay in the res­o­lu­tion of the sus­pen­sion of 72 work­ers and the is­sue of wage ne­go­ti­a­tions. "When you look at the play­ers in­volved..."

Re­my said the union came to the con­clu­sion af­ter what it sees as an "en­gi­neered de­lay" in re­solv­ing the is­sues. "The whole de­lay was en­gi­neered to al­low TSTT to pro­ceed with dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion against the sus­pend­ed work­ers and to make a claim that the union was in­volved in il­le­gal in­dus­tri­al ac­tion." Trac­ing the chain of events that led to the con­clu­sion, Re­my said the CWU had asked for the in­ter­ven­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning in the ap­par­ent pro­tract­ed de­lay. Sev­en­ty-five work­ers were sus­pend­ed with full pay three days af­ter they had a phys­i­cal strug­gle with TSTT se­cu­ri­ty guards out­side the com­pa­ny's Ed­ward Street, Port-of-Spain of­fice on Ju­ly 7.

The work­ers had gone to de­liv­er a let­ter to TSTT Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer, Rober­to Pe­on, when the strug­gle en­sued. Three of the work­ers were re­in­stat­ed while the rest re­mained on sus­pen­sion. "As far as we un­der­stand, Man­ning di­rect­ed Dr Lenny Saith, Min­is­ter in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, to han­dle the mat­ter with despatch. "We felt the mat­ter would be dealt with in a week's time. We were in­formed they would com­mence dis­cus­sion on Thurs­day 13. "But this was too late. TSTT had al­ready tak­en ac­tion against the work­ers," Re­my said.