Shir­van Williams

Pres­i­dent of the In­dus­tri­al Court Deb­o­rah Thomas-Fe­lix is ap­peal­ing to the Gov­ern­ment to give her staff more of­fice space for a bet­ter func­tion­ing unit. Thomas-Fe­lix made the ap­peal dur­ing her speech to of­fi­cial­ly open the the 2012-2013 law term of the In­dus­tri­al Court yes­ter­day at St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain. "Space at the In­dus­tri­al Court's Port-of-Spain build­ing is a peren­ni­al prob­lem," she said.

"Judges and staff oc­cu­py spaces in this build­ing which are less than ide­al and which are cer­tain­ly not ad­e­quate. This lack of space has stymied the op­er­a­tions of the court and has pre­vent­ed the reg­istry, the li­brary, the ac­counts de­part­ment, the ver­ba­tim note-tak­ing sec­tion, the IT unit, the sec­re­tari­at, the re­search unit and the se­cu­ri­ty unit from prop­er­ly func­tion­ing," she said.

"A lot of old­er law books had to be moved from the li­brary at the court to an ex­ter­nal ware­house which now great­ly af­fects the qual­i­ty of ser­vice which the li­brary can pro­vide," she said. "While I do not in any way want to be an un­gra­cious and rude neigh­bour, there is need for the In­dus­tri­al Court to take con­trol of and oc­cu­py all floors of the Port-of-Spain build­ing, a build­ing for which we pro­vide funds for all of the op­er­a­tions. I urge the au­thor­i­ties to give ac­tive con­sid­er­a­tion to this prob­lem which is a con­tin­u­ous hin­drance to the op­er­a­tion of the court."

She al­so used the op­por­tu­ni­ty to pub­licly ask why Ude­cott was still oc­cu­py­ing the court's car park. "An­oth­er press­ing and dis­turb­ing prob­lem is the sore sight at the Queen Street en­trance to the court and along the pe­riph­ery of the court...You may have no­ticed the gal­vanise and fish­net fences which bor­der and en­close the court," she said.

"Since 2006, Cab­i­net de­cid­ed to al­low Ude­cott to oc­cu­py a por­tion of the court's car park to fa­cil­i­tate the con­struc­tion of build­ings of two sides of the court. This de­ci­sion has cre­at­ed sev­er­al prob­lems over the past six years...some judges have been dam­aged by falling de­bris." De­spite all these chal­lenges, the court has still made sig­nif­i­cant im­prove­ments in de­liv­ery of jus­tice, she said.

Some of the im­prove­ments she not­ed were: the es­tab­lish­ment of sam­ples of ev­i­dence and ar­gu­ments and wit­ness state­ments, ac­cess to jus­tice, wages and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty com­pu­ta­tion, elec­tron­ic sign­ing, digi­ti­sa­tion, video con­fer­enc­ing and the launch of the first vol­ume of Law Re­ports last May. Thomas-Fe­lix said that over the last five years, there has been a steady in­crease in the num­ber of un­re­solved dis­putes be­tween unions and em­ploy­ers. She added that this may be due to the eco­nom­ic cli­mate in the world.

"Trinidad and To­ba­go's econ­o­my has for a long time been re­gard­ed as the main en­gine of the Cari­com re­gion," she said. "It has ex­pand­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly over the past two decades dri­ving busi­ness and in­vest­ment in the re­gion, but en­gine ap­pears to be los­ing steam." She said about 1,124 peo­ple have al­ready been laid off in the coun­try in 2011, with the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor hav­ing the high­est num­ber of re­trench­ments.

"There is no doubt that an un­healthy labour cli­mate can prove dis­as­trous for this coun­try in these times of eco­nom­ic un­cer­tain­ty," she said. Unions and em­ploy­ers have a cru­cial role to play in main­tain­ing so­cial sta­bil­i­ty in these times of re­ces­sion and re­cov­ery." This is why one of her main goals will be to re­duce the time for new col­lec­tive agree­ments be­tween em­ploy­ers and trade unions, she said.