Resh­ma Ra­goonath

TCL work­ers who claim to have been bru­talised by po­lice have met with chair­man of the Po­lice Com­plaints Au­thor­i­ty Gillian Lucky as in­ves­ti­ga­tors be­gan the probe in­to the al­le­ga­tions yes­ter­day. Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union branch pres­i­dent, Lawrence Re­naud and four work­ers, met with Lucky at her Port-of-Spain of­fice. Re­naud said the work­ers were sum­moned to a meet­ing with Lucky around 2 pm and she as­signed six in­ves­ti­ga­tors to record their state­ments. He said they were pleased their com­plaints were be­ing in­ves­ti­gat­ed. "Ms Lucky met with us and the in­ves­ti­ga­tors are tak­ing our state­ments. I do not know how long it will take," he said. The work­ers spent most of yes­ter­day af­ter­noon at the au­thor­i­ty giv­ing state­ments on last week's al­leged fra­cas be­tween po­lice of­fi­cers and the strik­ing em­ploy­ees. Yes­ter­day marked the eighth day of the TCL work­ers' strike ac­tion and Re­naud said the work­ers' re­solve re­mains "strong."

Last Tues­day night and Wednes­day morn­ing there was a heat­ed clash with po­lice. Work­ers used cell­phones to record the in­ci­dent which showed some of­fi­cers us­ing their ba­tons against strik­ers. Re­naud said since that in­ci­dent, there had been no con­flict with of­fi­cers. In fact, he said, the work­ers and po­lice sta­tioned at the Clax­ton Bay strike camp were get­ting along. "The po­lice of­fi­cers who are there now are re­al gen­tle­men. We does treat the po­lice good. We treat them as hu­man be­ings. Any po­lice mis­be­have, we re­move them; and any work­er who mis­be­have at the strike camp, we re­move them too. We be­lieve in dis­ci­pline," he added. Yes­ter­day morn­ing, OW­TU pres­i­dent gen­er­al, An­cel Ro­get, ad­dressed strik­ing work­ers at their camp site out­side TCL's Clax­ton Bay head­quar­ters.

He urged them to re­main stead­fast as they have 82 more days of strike ac­tion ahead. Re­naud said the union is wait­ing on man­age­ment "to make the call if they are se­ri­ous about set­tling the ne­go­ti­a­tions." He said the com­pa­ny was spread­ing ru­mours of wait­ing for the union to call and that it had writ­ten to the Labour Min­istry.

"They say­ing they try­ing to con­tact the union and no­body re­spond­ing... Ru­mours con­tin­ue," Re­naud said. Mean­while, Sam­sung En­gi­neer­ing work­ers who protest­ed out­side the gates of Petrotrin in Gas­par­il­lo, joined TCL work­ers at their camp­site in a show of sol­i­dar­i­ty. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers Union pres­i­dent Joseph Re­my al­so paid the work­ers a vis­it and pledged his sup­port in their strug­gle.

More in­fo

TCL has be­gun im­port­ing ce­ment from its Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos sub­sidiaries to meet sup­pli­ers' de­mand as the work­ers' strike en­tered day eight yes­ter­day. TCL gen­er­al man­ag­er, Sat­nar­ine Bachew, said in an in­ter­view yes­ter­day, "We are im­port­ing ce­ment from our com­pa­nies in Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica to fill the gap in the mar­ket."

He said the com­pa­ny had worked out a sched­ule for the im­ports but the fig­ures are un­avail­able at this stage.

"We have to roll out the fig­ures," he said. Bachew said the com­pa­ny is pre­pared to re­turn to the ne­go­ti­at­ing ta­ble with the OW­TU. "We are com­mit­ted to re­solv­ing this mat­ter. This is not a sit­u­a­tion we want to pro­long be­cause all of our stake­hold­ers are be­ing ad­verse­ly im­pact­ed: our em­ploy­ees, our sup­pli­ers and our cus­tomers. We are pre­pared to re­turn to the bar­gain­ing ta­ble at any point in time," Bachew said.