The T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce has wel­comed the de­ci­sion by the In­dus­tri­al Court to or­der strik­ing work­ers at state-owned oil com­pa­ny Petrotrin back to work.In a state­ment yes­ter­day, the Cham­ber said the work­ers' ac­tions were in con­tra­ven­tion of Sec­tion 63 (1) of the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act (IRA) and un­der­scored Petrotrin's strate­gic im­por­tance to the na­tion's up­stream and down­stream en­er­gy in­dus­try, the ser­vices sec­tor, in­di­vid­ual con­sumers and the econ­o­my.

"The strike ac­tion tak­en by the Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU), and the work­ers that they rep­re­sent, was de­ter­mined il­le­gal, and they should not have been al­lowed to hold the com­pa­ny and, by ex­ten­sion, the coun­try to ran­som.

"Hav­ing signed the col­lec­tive agree­ment with Petrotrin in Feb­ru­ary of this year, the union has no le­gal ground on which to con­duct strike ac­tion. We urge the OW­TU to fol­low the prop­er griev­ance pro­ce­dures as de­fined by the IRA, and to en­cour­age its mem­bers to op­er­ate with­in the laws of the land," the Cham­ber said.

The state­ment con­tin­ued: "Go­ing for­ward, we be­lieve that a sit­u­a­tion such as this can­not and must not be al­lowed to re­peat it­self, as un­sta­ble labour re­la­tions will con­tin­ue to be a threat to our com­pet­i­tive­ness and eco­nom­ic growth and de­vel­op­ment and ul­ti­mate­ly im­pact neg­a­tive­ly on our na­tion's abil­i­ty to at­tract For­eign Di­rect In­vest­ment.

"The use of al­ter­na­tive dis­pute res­o­lu­tion in re­solv­ing dis­putes is be­com­ing more preva­lent to­day. As such, the Cham­ber of­fers such dis­pute res­o­lu­tion ser­vices through our Me­di­a­tion Board-cer­ti­fied Dis­pute Res­o­lu­tion Cen­tre, and we rec­om­mend this as an­oth­er op­tion open to both par­ties."