Raphael John-Lall

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU), which rep­re­sents near­ly 2,000 work­ers at ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT, wants to see the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny 100 per cent back in lo­cal hands again and wants the work­ers to be able to buy the 49 per cent stake now helds by Ca­ble & Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

"We are go­ing to push for the 49 per­cent share that Ca­ble and Wire­less has to go in­to the hands of em­ploy­ees. We want to run Ca­ble and Wire­less out of town be­cause they have not con­tributed any­thing im­por­tant to the de­vel­op­ment to TSTT. Put the 49 per­cent in the hands of em­ploy­ees and we will show them we can run a ful­ly owned state owned en­ti­ty in the tele­com sec­tor that is sus­tain­able.

We are go­ing to chal­lenge the com­pa­ny on their pri­vati­sa­tion thrust," said Joseph Re­my, Pres­i­dent of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU).

Re­my was speak­ing at a lunch-time demon­stra­tion on Fri­day out­side of TSTT's Ed­ward St Port-of-Spain head­quar­ters, to protest against TSTT's po­si­tion on re­tirees' en­ti­tle­ments un­der the com­pa­ny's med­ical plan. Re­my al­so said that the lo­cal com­pa­ny was be­hind its Irish-owned com­peti­tor, Dig­i­cel in the roll-out of a new 4G net­work.

He re­ferred to Thurs­day's Busi­ness Guardian in­ter­view done with Dig­i­cel's out­go­ing CEO, Niall Do­ri­an who said Dig­i­cel is ex­pect­ing to launch its 4G net­work by the mid­dle of May. TSTT has said it will launch its 4G net­work in Sep­tem­ber. "We raise the is­sue with the half a bil­lion dol­lar net­work up­grade. He is say­ing they want to hit the mar­ket first, but when you read Thurs­day's Busi­ness Guardian we dis­cov­er Dig­i­cel is ahead of the game. So TSTT is be­hind.

Pe­on has not brought aboard any new ini­tia­tives. Every­thing he brought is what oth­er peo­ple rolled out." he said. Re­my said there is the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there would be re­trench­ment as the up­grade takes place. "We are telling the com­pa­ny you are en­ter­ing in­to a half a bil­lion dol­lar up­grade and up to now con­sis­tent with our col­lec­tive agree­ment, the com­pa­ny has not called to us to talk and we are say­ing to the com­pa­ny that you can­not en­gage in re­struc­tur­ing which im­pacts on the work­ers of the bar­gain­ing unit with­out con­sult­ing with us. We have not heard any­thing of­fi­cial on the re­struc­tur­ing but we have heard that there is in­ten­tion to re­struc­ture and re­duce staff," he said.