1) The OW­TU is de­mand­ing min­i­mum wage for the in­land and off­shore work­ers. Is the pub­lic (the share­hold­ers of Petrotrin) aware of the min­i­mum wage of Petrotrin? It is re­port­ed to be $66 an hour. That is what a jan­i­tor is said to re­ceive.

Petrotrin is a pub­lic en­ti­ty, why has noth­ing been pub­lished of their wage struc­ture? In my opin­ion, the el­e­vat­ed wage struc­ture (in­clu­sive of CO­LA, med­ical, meal al­lowance etc) of this com­pa­ny is a large con­trib­u­tor to it be­ing a failed en­ti­ty; con­sec­u­tive years of bil­lion-dol­lar loss­es and our con­tin­u­ing in­crease in tax­es.

2) The pres­i­dent gen­er­al states that his mem­bers have not had an in­crease in six years where­as oth­er gov­ern­ment em­ploy­ees have got­ten a wage in­crease.

I am sure that the OW­TU wage struc­ture of Petrotrin still, de­spite no in­crease in six years, ex­ceeds that of oth­er gov­ern­ment em­ploy­ees and most, if not all, pri­vate sec­tor em­ploy­ees.

How is it jus­ti­fi­able/valid to ne­go­ti­ate, far less sanc­tion, a wage in­crease of a con­tin­u­al­ly fail­ing (pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and prof­itabil­i­ty) com­pa­ny?

3) It is we, the tax pay­ers, who bear the brunt of Petrotrin's loss­es.

I am al­so of the opin­ion, that should this wage struc­ture con­tin­ue to be or, God for­bid, the Gov­ern­ment give in­to the OW­TU's de­mands and sanc­tion an in­crease to the al­ready vault­ed wage struc­ture, there will be an in­crease of tax­es to cov­er this ex­pense.

4) It is against the work­ers rights–among a host of oth­ers–to be drug test­ed.

The pro­duc­tion lev­el de­creas­es every year, there has been no dis­ci­pli­nary ac­tion or ac­count­abil­i­ty, work eth­ic is cor­ro­sive.

There is hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars per year in loss­es and no re­struc­tur­ing.

Their "strength" in num­bers should not be al­lowed to pre­vail over wis­dom and well-be­ing of coun­try.

Please, let us start putting coun­try first in­stead of per­son­al greed.

&nb­sp;

RP