Sascha Wil­son

The Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union (OW­TU) to­day will chal­lenge an in­junc­tion grant­ed to Trinidad Ce­ment Lim­it­ed (TCL) on Fri­day night which or­dered protest­ing work­ers to re­turn to work.OW­TU pres­i­dent An­cil Ro­get and TCL's man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Sat­nar­ine Bechew con­firmed yes­ter­day the mat­ter would be heard in the In­dus­tri­al Court, Port-of-Spain, at around 1 pm.Work­ers shut down op­er­a­tions at TCL's Clax­ton Bay and Mayo fa­cil­i­ties for two days, caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant loss­es to the com­pa­ny, af­ter ne­go­ti­a­tions broke down.

The com­pa­ny ap­plied to the In­dus­tri­al Court for an ex-parte in­junc­tion de­bar­ring work­ers from fur­ther protest ac­tion, which was grant­ed.Bechew told the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day: "Every­thing is run­ning smooth­ly. As you know we re­sumed op­er­a­tions on Sat­ur­day evening. We have been run­ning since then. "We had sales late in­to Sat­ur­day night and it con­tin­ued yes­ter­day. Peo­ple who had run out of stock were stock­ing up."

He said he ex­pect­ed the OW­TU to chal­lenge the in­junc­tion when the mat­ter came up for hear­ing to­day. How­ev­er, he said, on Wednes­day they would re­turn to the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble where they would try to reach a speedy res­o­lu­tion."Now that op­er­a­tions are back up we are com­mit­ted to a speedy res­o­lu­tion to this," Bechew said.When con­tact­ed yes­ter­day Ro­get said: "The com­pa­ny went be­hind our backs and got a court to agree with them for the work­ers to go back out to work. The mat­ter will be heard to­mor­row when we will get an op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­spond."

Up to Sat­ur­day morn­ing work­ers were out­side the Clax­ton Bay plant, de­mand­ing that man­age­ment meet with the union's team to set­tle ne­go­ti­a­tions which have been on­go­ing for three years.By evening, how­ev­er, they were back out to work. More than 400 work­ers are af­fect­ed by the pro­longed ne­go­ti­a­tions.