Akash Sama­roo

Lead Ed­i­tor - Pol­i­tics

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

Af­ter sev­er­al hours of tense ne­go­ti­a­tions, the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) and the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer (CPO) have reached an agree­ment on a ten per cent wage in­crease for pub­lic sec­tor work­ers.

The deal is ex­pect­ed to cost the State ap­prox­i­mate­ly $3.8 bil­lion in back pay and an ad­di­tion­al $420 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly in re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture go­ing for­ward.

CPO re­tired Com­man­der Dr Daryl Din­di­al in­di­cat­ed that the PSA at­tempt­ed to push for a 12 per cent in­crease, but that was re­ject­ed.

On Mon­day, both par­ties will meet to sign the agree­ment.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia af­ter al­most ten hours of talks with the union, Din­di­al ex­plained how the ten per cent would be spread over the two ne­go­ti­at­ing pe­ri­ods.

“One pe­ri­od is 2014-2016, the oth­er is 2017-2019. The dis­tri­b­u­tion of the per­cent­age is one per cent in 2014, one per cent in 2015, one per cent in 2016, one per cent in 2017, one per cent in 2018, and then five per cent in 2019,” Din­di­al ex­plained.

He added that when Cost of Liv­ing Al­lowances are con­sid­ered, then the net ef­fect would be around 15 per cent.

Asked what hap­pens next, the CPO ex­plained, “The Cab­i­net has to rat­i­fy the agree­ment. So I’ve spo­ken to the Sec­re­tary of the Cab­i­net, and they have ac­cept­ed that they will ac­cept an ad hoc note to be placed be­fore the Cab­i­net on Tues­day.”

“Af­ter Cab­i­net rat­i­fies the note, I will be send­ing out an im­ple­men­ta­tion in­struc­tion cir­cu­lar to all per­ma­nent sec­re­taries to be­gin the process of au­dit­ing all the files.”

He re­vealed that Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo ex­pressed a com­mit­ment to mak­ing some pay­ment to pub­lic ser­vants in De­cem­ber.

“He has ex­pressed that com­mit­ment to me as ear­ly as this morn­ing, that the Min­istry of Fi­nance and the tech­nocrats are work­ing to see what is pos­si­ble for some pay­ment to oc­cur in the month of De­cem­ber.”

The CPO said he could not ac­cept the PSA’s coun­ter­pro­pos­al of 12 per cent.

“But this is in the spir­it of ne­go­ti­a­tions. You could pro­pose any­thing, and you could hope to jus­ti­fy whether they could get it or not. So yes, there was an at­tempt by the PSA to ask for more than ten per cent plus CO­LA con­sol­i­da­tion, but the Gov­ern­ment main­tained its com­mit­ment of of­fer­ing ten per cent.”

The CPO al­so con­firmed Guardian Me­dia’s re­port that no of­fi­cial of­fer was made to the PSA last Fri­day, al­though he added that he could un­der­stand why it may have seemed so to the union.

Mean­while, PSA pres­i­dent Fe­l­isha Thomas de­scribed the suc­cess­ful ne­go­ti­a­tion as a good day for her mem­ber­ship.

“And while there are some ar­eas to be con­clud­ed, what we have agreed to with the CPO to­day is the new salaries payable in the month of Jan­u­ary and across the board pay­ment to pub­lic of­fi­cers and as well as we are look­ing at the pay­ment in re­la­tion to the out­stand­ing ar­rears on the med­ical plan as well.”

She added, “We can to­day con­firm that CO­LA has been con­sol­i­dat­ed for both pe­ri­ods, for the pe­ri­od 14 to 16 and for the pe­ri­od 17 to 19. And of course, that is a big win for mem­bers of the civ­il ser­vice statu­to­ry au­thor­i­ties and the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly.”

Thomas said she is still con­fi­dent that monies could be paid by Christ­mas.