Kevon Felmine

While the Oil­fields Work­ers'' Trade Union (OW­TU) claimed vic­to­ry in per­suad­ing Petrotrin to in­crease its 0-0-0 wage of­fer to set­tle at five per cent for the col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing pe­ri­od of 2011-2014, not all work­ers were pleased with Mon­day's agree­ment.

Af­ter weeks of prepar­ing to strike, Petrotrin work­ers re­turned to work yes­ter­day with a fresh man­date from the union to in­crease their pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

There were work­ers who were hap­py with the in­crease, but some work­ers ex­pressed dis­ap­point­ment that the union set­tled for less than the 10 per cent in­crease that they ini­tial­ly pro­posed to the com­pa­ny.

Be­fore lead­ing the work­ers in­to the Pointe-a-Pierre re­fin­ery, for­mer Pointe-a-Pierre branch pres­i­dent for the OW­TU, Fos­ter Har­ring­ton, told work­ers to stay loy­al to the union and do not vent their dis­cord on Face­book or in the me­dia. He said the union will con­tin­ue to do what is nec­es­sary to en­sure work­ers con­tin­ue to have jobs and live a com­fort­able life.

Lyn­don Mc Clashie said while he re­mains loy­al to the union, he did not con­sid­er the out­come of Mon­day's con­cil­i­a­tion meet­ing at the Min­istry of Labour as a set­tle­ment.

"It was like, give me a five per cent on my pay and I will go back to work while we talk. They are deal­ing with 2011-2014 right now and the five per cent is go­ing to add to our rates by Feb­ru­ary 28. Ba­si­cal­ly it is a small vic­to­ry." Mc Clashie said.

An­oth­er Trin­mar em­ploy­ee said a five per cent in­crease would add $1,000 to her salary, but af­ter tax­es and oth­er de­duc­tions, there will not be much left.

"I've done a rough cal­cu­la­tion thus far on the five per cent and it would rough­ly add $1000 to my salary. Af­ter tax­es and de­duc­tions, I don't see it mak­ing a dent in my dis­pos­able in­come. I'm not say­ing that I am sat­is­fied or dis­sat­is­fied. I am just one of the few peo­ple who are hap­py to have a job in the cur­rent state of the econ­o­my and the com­pa­ny be­cause there are a num­ber of peo­ple who are wor­ried about mort­gages, car pay­ments, kids at UWI and some of them are in school."

OW­TU's chief ed­u­ca­tion and eesearch of­fi­cer Ozzi, War­wick, said while some mem­bers were not pleased, they should note that the five per cent in­crease on­ly cov­ers two years with the third year still to be ne­go­ti­at­ed.

He said there were those who said the five per cent was not enough, while oth­ers said an in­crease was bad for the coun­try. In un­der­stand­ing the cur­rent fis­cal sit­u­a­tion of both the com­pa­ny and the econ­o­my, he said the union had to find a bal­ance to ben­e­fit all.

At Mon­day's meet­ing with Petrotrin and Labour Min­is­ter Jen­nifer Bap­tiste-Primus, he said the union was adamant about in­creas­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by im­ple­ment­ing prop­er sys­tems and man­age­ment struc­tures at the com­pa­ny.