Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

Se­nior Re­porter

eliz­a­beth.gon­za­les@guardian.co.tt

Works and In­fra­struc­ture Min­is­ter Jear­lean John says work­ers hired un­der the Gov­ern­ment’s Na­tion­al Re­cruit­ment Dri­ve are “do­ing a fan­tas­tic job,” even as some em­ploy­ees con­tin­ue to com­plain about de­layed pay­ments and un­cer­tain­ty over their con­tracts.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, John again de­fend­ed the pro­gramme and said the Min­istry was will­ing to fol­low up on com­plaints once work­ers came for­ward with de­tails.

“I don’t know who they are,” John said, re­fer­ring to work­ers com­plain­ing about non-pay­ment.

“We wouldn’t be there de­lib­er­ate­ly not pay­ing peo­ple. Every­thing has to work for peo­ple to get paid.”

John said she reg­u­lar­ly checks on salary is­sues.

She al­so said work­ers with pay­ment is­sues should come for­ward so the min­istry could in­ves­ti­gate.

“If you have the names, they’re call­ing, and so on, we could al­ways fol­low up. We’re al­ways very help­ful,” John said.

John said she could on­ly speak about work­ers at­tached to her min­istry and main­tained they had been work­ing hard across projects.

The Na­tion­al Re­cruit­ment Dri­ve was launched with a promise of 20,000 jobs.

Ear­li­er this year, Guardian Me­dia re­port­ed that 1,801 ca­su­al work­ers had been hired through the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture un­der the pro­gramme.

John lat­er said an­oth­er 800 work­ers were ex­pect­ed to be brought on from March 1 to ex­pand teams across the coun­try, mean­ing the work­force at­tached to the Min­istry’s arm of the pro­gramme could now be ap­prox­i­mate­ly 2,600 work­ers once the ad­di­tion­al batch was ful­ly on­board­ed.

The min­istry has said work­ers un­der the pro­gramme have been in­volved in road main­te­nance, drainage clean­ing, veg­e­ta­tion con­trol and flood mit­i­ga­tion works across Trinidad and To­ba­go.

But while the pro­gramme con­tin­ues to ex­pand, some work­ers say pay­ment de­lays re­main an is­sue. One work­er told Guardian Me­dia em­ploy­ees had on­ly been paid up to the sixth fort­night de­spite al­ready com­plet­ing 11 fort­nights of work.

“We got the six fort­nights,” the work­er said.

“We haven’t get (sic) the sev­enth, eight, nine and ten fort­night be­cause this week from Mon­day is our 11th fort­night.”

The work­er al­so claimed em­ploy­ees nev­er re­ceived a sec­ond con­tract af­ter their orig­i­nal three-month agree­ment end­ed, al­though they were told their em­ploy­ment had been ex­tend­ed.

The work­er said they were told they had re­ceived an­oth­er three-month ex­ten­sion, but had not seen the pa­per­work.

“I hear from the check­er we get an­oth­er three months ex­ten­sion,” the work­er said.

Leaked Cab­i­net doc­u­ments show Gov­ern­ment had iden­ti­fied sev­er­al chal­lenges with the pro­gramme dur­ing its roll­out.

The records men­tioned dif­fi­cul­ties ac­cess­ing fund­ing from the Em­ploy­ment Fund un­der the Min­istry of Fi­nance, lim­it­ed fund­ing with­in the Min­istry of Works and In­fra­struc­ture, in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions con­cerns and in­ad­e­quate hu­man re­sources to su­per­vise work­ers.

An­oth­er Cab­i­net note stat­ed the Min­istry pur­sued a $16 mil­lion trans­fer from funds al­lo­cat­ed to the Port Au­thor­i­ty’s coastal steam­ers sub­sidy to help cov­er wages, Na­tion­al In­sur­ance, health sur­charge and cost of liv­ing al­lowance pay­ments be­tween De­cem­ber 2025 and Feb­ru­ary 2026.

The doc­u­ments al­so showed Cab­i­net lat­er ap­proved fund­ing ex­ceed­ing $53 mil­lion to sup­port the con­tin­ued op­er­a­tion of the pro­gramme for the ini­tial 1,801 work­ers.

Mean­while, some work­ers al­so raised con­cerns about their em­ploy­ment sta­tus and ac­cess to union rep­re­sen­ta­tion be­cause they were hired as tem­po­rary em­ploy­ees. One work­er claimed em­ploy­ees were told they could not join a union through the Min­istry be­cause they were tem­po­rary work­ers.

Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo could not be reached for com­ment.