The Min­istry of Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment will cre­ate a so­cial di­a­logue com­mit­tee to ed­u­cate em­ploy­ees and em­ploy­ers on work­ers' rights. Hous­ing Min­is­ter Dr Roodal Mooni­lal made the an­nounce­ment at a stake­hold­er up­date, com­mem­o­rat­ing May Day (In­ter­na­tion­al Work­ers' Day) at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain, on Mon­day. Em­ploy­ee re­la­tions spe­cial­ist Robert Guisep­pi is lead­ing the min­istry's ef­forts to com­ply with the de­cent work agen­da set by the In­ter­na­tion­al Labour Or­gan­i­sa­tion. The agen­da has been adopt­ed in 178 coun­tries. Since Jan­u­ary, Guisep­pi has had meet­ings with CEPEP board mem­bers, field of­fi­cers and staff, where work­ers were able to raise griev­ances and dis­cuss meth­ods for im­prov­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

A meet­ing of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 200 CEPEP con­trac­tors was al­so or­gan­ised as part of the so­cial di­a­logue ini­tia­tive. Guisep­pi said so­cial di­a­logue was nec­es­sary be­cause there was not suf­fi­cient union rep­re­sen­ta­tion for labour­ers.

"Work­ers need to be trained and ed­u­cat­ed so they can be part of the trans­for­ma­tion," he said. He added that the next phase of the project would in­clude meet­ings with com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who re­ceive ser­vices from CEPEP. Mooni­lal said the min­istry em­barked on the so­cial di­a­logue ini­tia­tive be­cause it was the host min­istry for var­i­ous labour-in­ten­sive pro­grammes with more than 25,000 em­ploy­ees. CEPEP alone has 10,000 em­ploy­ees. A cer­tifi­cate of good char­ac­ter re­quire­ment for CEPEP su­per­vi­so­ry staff, al­so was be­ing con­sid­ered to com­bat il­le­gal ac­tiv­i­ty among work­ers, Mooni­lal said. He al­so an­nounced that with­in the next year, the na­tion­al re­for­esta­tion pro­gramme would tran­si­tion to a "green" pro­gramme, fo­cused on sus­tain­able liv­ing prac­tices.