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Saturday, July 12, 2025

OWTU to battle for 6 dismissed Petrotrin workers

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20140214

Oil­fields Work­ers' Trade Union pres­i­dent gen­er­al An­cel Ro­get says no stone will be left un­turned when the union tack­les Petrotrin over the dis­missal of six em­ploy­ees who are be­ing held re­spon­si­ble for last De­cem­ber's oil spill dis­as­ter.At a press con­fer­ence at the union's San Fer­nan­do head­quar­ters on Tues­day, Ro­get said the dis­missal was a ploy to cov­er up Petrotrin man­age­ment's gross neg­li­gence in main­tain­ing in­fra­struc­ture, which led to over 7,000 bar­rels of oil be­ing leaked in­to the Gulf of Paria.Ro­get said: "The is­sue of the dis­missals will be tak­en through the griev­ances pro­ce­dure and the work­ers will get the rep­re­sen­ta­tion that the OW­TU is ac­cus­tomed to giv­ing.

"We are con­fi­dent that every sin­gle work­er will be re­turned to their jobs but we are al­so aware that the man­age­ment, be­cause of the sys­tem, be­cause of the in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions pro­ce­dure as it re­lates to the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act cur­rent­ly, that they will abuse it. They will use their deep pock­ets in the mean­time to de­flect all of those is­sues from them­selves."Al­though the OW­TU was rep­re­sent­ed on the com­mit­tee in­ves­ti­gat­ing the oil spill, Ro­get said no part of the re­port said the work­ers were cul­pa­ble and that ac­tion would be tak­en against them.Deny­ing Petrotrin pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali's ex­pla­na­tion of how the six work­ers' neg­li­gence caused the en­vi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter, Ro­get said if the line had not been cor­rod­ed there would have been no spill.He said every time there was a leak, the lines would be patched but that did not mean they were prop­er­ly main­tained.

He added: "It is not the work­ers who are re­spon­si­ble, it is the man­age­ment who are re­spon­si­ble in the first place for not ef­fect­ing their work pro­grammes that led to sealine num­ber ten rup­tur­ing," he said."The pres­i­dent said that it was in­spect­ed and that once it was in­spect­ed, that no faults were found with the line. "That is an­oth­er one of the many lies they were telling, be­cause if and when the ev­i­dence comes to the fore, it will show that the lines were not in­spect­ed since 1996. If we did not have the rup­tur­ing of the line, cer­tain­ly the oil would not have gone in­to the sea."

He said: "At the rate at which pump­ing oc­curs, you would have had a lot of oil go­ing in­to the sea be­fore you could have made any kind of re­cov­ery.

"The sys­tems in place to al­low for re­cov­ery ef­forts, all of those things are cap­tured in the re­port and the in­ves­ti­ga­tion."That is why are say­ing that in­stead of al­low­ing the man­age­ment to skew the in­ves­ti­ga­tions in their own in­ter­est, we should have an in­de­pen­dent in­quiry in­to what oc­curred. You can­not ex­pect Petrotrin to in­ves­ti­gate it­self."On the spe­cif­ic re­port that led to the fir­ing of the work­ers, he said: "In the case of what oc­curred, an in­ves­ti­ga­tion team hand­ed the re­port to the man­age­ment."The man­age­ment sani­tised the re­port. They did what they want with the re­port, quot­ed from a re­port that no­body had seen and then took ac­tion against work­ers who ought to be on the job at the same time.


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