CAS­TRIES–Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ken­ny An­tho­ny has ap­pealed to pub­lic work­ers to ac­cept his gov­ern­ment's four per cent wage in­crease and pre­vent the is­land from "any fur­ther hard­ship" as work­ers stayed away from their jobs for high­er salaries.

"Our coun­try does not need may­hem, con­fu­sion and dis­agree­ment at this time, our peo­ple need to get to­geth­er, we have a cri­sis on our hands to deal with and it is crit­i­cal and cru­cial that we come to­geth­er deal with it, but very clear­ly it has to be a shared re­spon­si­bil­i­ty across the board," An­tho­ny said.The St Lu­cia Cham­ber of Com­merce, In­dus­try and Agri­cul­ture (CCIA) Mon­day called for an end to the in­dus­tri­al ac­tion by pub­lic ser­vants urg­ing both par­ties to re­turn to the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble.

"This move we be­lieve is cor­rect and pos­i­tive, as dif­fer­ences of this sort are best re­solved through di­a­logue, pro­por­tion­al­i­ty, tol­er­ance and un­der­stand­ing of the in­ter­ests of all con­cerned," said CCIA ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Bri­an Louisy.The pub­lic work­ers last week be­gan their in­dus­tri­al ac­tion in sup­port of the Trade Union Fed­er­a­tion (TUF) over de­mands for in­creased salaries and wages that the gov­ern­ment said it can­not meet.

Their ac­tions have crip­pled the pub­lic ser­vice and schools for a sec­ond con­sec­u­tive week and on Mon­day, the re­gion­al air­line, LI­AT, briefly sus­pend­ed flights in and out of the George F. Charles Air­port on the out­skirts of the cap­i­tal be­cause of the lack of fire ser­vices.Last Wednes­day, Prime Min­is­ter An­tho­ny said that the coun­try could on­ly af­ford a four per cent wage hike for the 2010-2012 tri­en­ni­um while the TUF is stick­ing to its de­mand for a 9.5 per cent in­crease or six per cent with stip­u­lat­ed con­di­tions.

Prime Min­is­ter An­tho­ny who ad­dressed the na­tion last Wednes­day and called for the im­passe to go be­fore ar­bi­tra­tion, was again ap­peal­ing for good sense to pre­vail, and for pub­lic ser­vants to un­der­stand that their ac­tions would hurt the en­tire coun­try.He re­it­er­at­ed that the is­land's fi­nances were in se­ri­ous prob­lems and that "for the very first time the Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank has list­ed us as a coun­try in the dan­ger zone, in the zone of oth­ers in un­sus­tain­able debt lev­els we are in dan­ger un­less we take cor­rec­tive ac­tion.

An­tho­ny said that the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) has com­plet­ed an as­sess­ment of the na­tion­al econ­o­my and is ex­ceed­ing­ly con­cerned.De­spite the plea, the TUF said it ex­pects the ac­tion by the work­ers to con­tin­ue and that work­ers would meet on Thurs­day to dis­cuss the way for­ward.

Last week, An­tho­ny said that the gov­ern­ment would need an es­ti­mat­ed EC$42 mil­lion (One EC dol­lar = US$0.37 cents) to meet the four per cent wage hike bill adding that this could al­so lead to re­duc­tion in ex­pen­di­ture for ser­vices to the pop­u­la­tion.

CMC