A warn­ing from the pres­i­dent gen­er­al of the Oil­field Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) An­cel Ro­get that as ear­ly as Car­ni­val, Petrotrin work­ers could go on strike in an ef­fort to force the state-owned oil com­pa­ny to in­crease its five per cent wage of­fer.In a tele­phone in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian on Tues­day, Ro­get said the union and the com­pa­ny will be head­ing to the Min­istry of Labour for con­cil­i­a­tion talks, but if that fails, it will ex­er­cise its op­tion and serve strike no­tice on Petrotrin.

"We have no in­ten­tion of spend­ing a lot of time at the Min­istry of Labour. We will go there and if the min­is­ter does his best and there is still no res­o­lu­tion of the is­sues, then we have to op­tion to serve strike no­tice and we will serve strike no­tice. I would say that could come in a mat­ter of weeks," said Ro­get."We are prepar­ing to go to the Min­istry of Labour, but do not rule out strike ac­tion at Petrotrin and we don't want to hear any­thing about the PNM be­cause we have set­tled the is­sue of the PNM since the May 24 last year."

Ro­get point­ed to Petrotrin's an­nounce­ment of an unau­dit­ed prof­it of $2 bil­lion for the last fis­cal year as an ex­am­ple of the abil­i­ty of the com­pa­ny to in­crease its wage of­fer and said that the prof­it was re­alised de­spite poor man­age­ment."The an­nounce­ment of a $2 bil­lion prof­it over the last fis­cal year could not have been re­alised with­out the work­ers. Even though oil prices were high, if you do not have work­er to bring that oil to the sur­face, re­fine it and mar­ket it, then you will not have any prof­it. And this is done de­spite the poor di­rec­tion from the board and man­age­ment and, there­fore, we will not ac­cept any five per cent."

The OW­TU pres­i­dent said the work­force at Petrotrin is not con­sid­ered a pri­or­i­ty. He ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment and Petrotrin board of cre­at­ing a stale­mate by in­struct­ing man­age­ment that they should go no fur­ther than five per cent. He said Petrotrin needs an in­jec­tion of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, but that can­not hap­pen if the em­ploy­ees are not fair­ly com­pen­sat­ed and if the com­pa­ny is not re­struc­tured.

He said there is no demon­strat­ed con­cern from the board, led by its chair­man Lind­say Gillette, to re­or­gan­ise the com­pa­ny, even though the union pre­sent­ed him with a pro­posed struc­ture more than a year ago.Ro­get said his union had looked at the struc­ture and op­er­a­tions of all Petrotrin's pre­de­ces­sor com­pa­nies in­clud­ing: Trin­toc, Trin­topec and Trin­mar and pro­duced a struc­ture that it felt was a good hy­brid that would have led to max­i­mum per­for­mance at the com­pa­ny.

To date, though, the chair­man has not re­spond­ed to the union's pro­pos­al.Un­der the pro­posed struc­ture, the com­pa­ny would be bro­ken up in­to man­age­able unit­ed with there be­ing a sep­a­rate or­gan­i­sa­tion for ex­plo­ration and pro­duc­tion, one for re­fin­ing and mar­ket­ing, and Trin­mar be­ing an­oth­er en­ti­ty. Ro­get said this would lead to a high­er lev­el of ac­count­abil­i­ty and de­liv­er­abil­i­ty. He ar­gued that the present struc­ture is too cen­tralised and leads to no one tak­ing re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for when things go wrong.

Ro­get said the board was con­tin­u­ing with a struc­ture that al­lows mem­bers to ap­point their friends and fam­i­ly to po­si­tions of in­flu­ence. He said noth­ing is be­ing done to a struc­ture that fa­cil­i­ties cor­rup­tion. He called for the En­er­gy min­is­ter to in­ter­vene."To this day, the new Min­is­ter of En­er­gy has not seen it fit to meet with the union, which is a ma­jor stake­hold­er in the com­pa­ny."As we speak, the cat crack­er and a num­ber of plants are still down. We have man­agers who have been pro­mot­ed who are known fail­ures and they plan to bring in a pres­i­dent who we know will be a friend or sup­port­er. But we will op­pose them in the strongest pos­si­ble way. I as­sure you of that."

EN­ER­GY RE­PORTER