Days af­ter dai­ly-paid work­ers stormed the San Fer­nan­do City Cor­po­ra­tion de­mand­ing their wages, a protest by month­ly-paid staff over sim­i­lar con­cerns was nar­row­ly avert­ed yes­ter­day.

The em­ploy­ees had gath­ered at the near­by City Au­di­to­ri­um and were be­ing ad­dressed by their union rep­re­sen­ta­tive, Kester Thomas, be­fore march­ing across to the cor­po­ra­tion to con­front man­age­ment.

How­ev­er, Al­der­men Vil­iana Ra­moutars­ingh and Rooplal Sama­roo ap­proached, apol­o­gis­ing as they in­di­cat­ed that salaries would be paid by Mon­day, for the lat­est.

Ra­moutars­ingh said as­sur­ances were giv­en in the coun­cil meet­ing that salaries will be paid by Mon­day. “The re­lease was made. This morn­ing (Fri­day), I would have spo­ken to the min­is­ter be­cause I, my­self, was not aware that month­ly paid were not paid. She had no idea; the PS had no idea. We as­sumed that what was sent in would have in­clud­ed dai­ly and month­ly paid. That was the case...but you will be paid.”

On Tues­day, dai­ly-paid work­ers, joined by the Con­trac­tors and Gen­er­al Work­ers Trade Union, stormed the cor­po­ra­tion, de­mand­ing their wages. They were paid af­ter Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Khadi­jah Ameen in­ter­vened.

How­ev­er, Thomas, the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Of­fi­cer of the Pub­lic Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA), called for prop­er over­sight and com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the work­ers.

He said that Sep­tem­ber 25 was the end of the fi­nan­cial year, and the month­ly-paid work­ers ought to have been paid by then. “What we would like is for the man­age­ment of the cor­po­ra­tion to come and brief their staff and give them a con­firmed date and the rea­son why they were not paid on time. Things have to be done in ac­cor­dance so that it will not have any repli­ca.”

While thank­ing the al­der­men for their feed­back, he said, “We are ask­ing the San Fer­nan­do Cor­po­ra­tion, please be very adamant when you com­ing to pay peo­ple. These are work­ers who have fam­i­lies. They have loans. They have a lot of things de­pend­ing on that.”

He said it is un­ac­cept­able that the work­ers were not in­formed that their salaries would not be paid on time. “When we spoke to the al­der­men, we re­alised it is not a Gov­ern­ment prob­lem from cen­tral Gov­ern­ment, it was tar­di­ness on the part of the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the San Fer­nan­do Cor­po­ra­tion, so they know who the vil­lain is,” he said.

Guardian Me­dia was told that the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the cor­po­ra­tion, Heather Craw­ford, was not in the of­fice yes­ter­day, and at­tempts to reach the deputy CEO were un­suc­cess­ful.