Con­struc­tion of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way ex­ten­sion re­mained at a stand­still again for most of the day yes­ter­day as protest­ing work­ers is­sued an ul­ti­ma­tum to Brazil­ian con­trac­tor OAS Con­struc­to­ra to ad­dress their wage and safe­ty con­cerns in 15 days.The Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union's labour re­la­tions of­fi­cer Aaron Moyne met with the work­ers at noon and told them the com­pa­ny had promised to meet some of their de­mands.

How­ev­er, an­gry work­ers who gath­ered at the Gol­con­da job site said they would with­hold their ser­vices if prop­er wages were not arranged. Moyne told work­ers the OW­TU will meet with OAS and is­sue the ul­ti­ma­tum."We are giv­ing them 15 days, un­til May 13, to ad­dress this. We will al­so build our case and walk with doc­u­ments to show that the work­ers are un­der­paid. We will not al­low them to bring ex­pa­tri­ates to take our jobs," Moyne said.

Hold­ing up a doc­u­ment from project man­ag­er An­dre Luiz Al­bu­querque Car­val­ho, Moyne said OAS Con­struc­to­ra had re­quest­ed 30 days to im­prove their work­ing con­di­tions with wa­ter dis­tri­b­u­tion.How­ev­er, a work­er shout­ed, "That is too long. By then we would dead!"

Moyne said OAS promised to buy a new con­tain­er to store the cool­ers and the drink­ing wa­ter."They said they will des­ig­nate a per­son to clean the cool­ers be­fore the com­mence­ment of the works. Is this suf­fi­cient?" Moyne asked.

High­way work in lim­bo

The work­ers shout­ed , "No!"Read­ing from the doc­u­ment, Moyne said: "The com­pa­ny is pay­ing for five-day-a-week clean­ing. They said it is im­pos­si­ble to clean all toi­lets when the toi­let is far from the road and when it rains, the pump truck does not have ac­cess to it." With re­gard to claims that wa­ter was avail­able at all sites, the work­ers de­nied that wa­ter was avail­able to wash hands.

Car­val­ho said in his state­ment that an as­sess­ment would be done to de­ter­mine if more lock­ers and cloth­ing sup­plies were need­ed, but Moyne said work­ers need­ed a prop­er chang­ing room.Car­val­ho said two am­bu­lances were suf­fi­cient for each of the as­signed ar­eas, and promised to re­view tents and have four bus­es on site to shut­tle work­ers.On Mon­day, Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Dr Su­ruj Ram­bachan ex­pressed hope that the work­ers' con­cerns would be set­tled bi­lat­er­al­ly and said he would meet with them if not.

OAS re­sponds

In his state­ment, Car­val­ho ex­plained that ex­pa­tri­ates were brought in to work in case OAS could not find enough qual­i­fied work­ers in the lo­cal mar­ket.He de­nied OAS had no emer­gency pro­ce­dures and emer­gency drills."This project is not that risky, in the sense that we don't have as much dan­ger­ous gas­es, ex­treme work on heights, con­fined ar­eas, live elec­tri­cal wires where a per­mit to work is manda­to­ry every day," he said.

"How­ev­er, a job safe­ty analy­sis is pro­vid­ed for each job task for each em­ploy­ee to read, un­der­stand and sign every day."At some in­stances in the fu­ture some places may re­quire a per­mit-to-work sys­tem, for ex­am­ple ex­treme heights like bridges or deep ex­ca­va­tions or tun­nels."Al­so OAS and its sub­con­trac­tors are aware of some works that will re­quire a per­mit-to-work sys­tem and cer­tain things are be­ing put in place to en­sure the health and safe­ty of each em­ploy­ee."

He said each Mon­day of the month a gen­er­al HSE meet­ing is held at each camp­site, and on all oth­er days of the week the fore­men of each crew has a "tool­box talk" with all his work­ers, al­so site in­spec­tion are be­ing done by the Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Co Ltd (Nid­co), Min­istry of Works, OS­HA and AE­COM on a week­ly ba­sis.