Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance Kennedy Swarats­ingh is rub­bish­ing claims made by for­mer fi­nance min­is­ter Colm Im­bert that the un­em­ploy­ment rate has near­ly dou­bled.

At a Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) meet­ing on Thurs­day in Mal­abar, Im­bert sound­ed alarm bells over what he de­scribed as a sharp rise in un­em­ploy­ment un­der the new Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) ad­min­is­tra­tion, just three months af­ter the PNM was vot­ed out of of­fice.

Im­bert claimed that un­der the pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tion, of which he was a min­is­ter, the na­tion­al un­em­ploy­ment rate stood at four per cent.

How­ev­er, since the change in gov­ern­ment, Im­bert al­leged that the fig­ure has spiked to sev­en per cent, rep­re­sent­ing an in­crease from 30,000 to ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50,000 un­em­ployed peo­ple across Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Im­bert pro­vid­ed no ex­pla­na­tion as to how he ar­rived at the pur­port­ed un­em­ploy­ment sta­tis­tic but at­trib­uted the “sharp rise” to cuts in the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and Na­tion­al Re­for­esta­tion and Wa­ter­shed Pro­gramme.

How­ev­er, yes­ter­day, Swarats­ingh told Guardian Me­dia that da­ta ob­tained from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice (CSO) sug­gest­ed that the cur­rent un­em­ploy­ment rate was 4.9 per cent.

The CSO is the pri­ma­ry source for of­fi­cial un­em­ploy­ment da­ta.

As of the end of April 2025, the lat­est of­fi­cial da­ta from the CSO for the un­em­ploy­ment rate in Trinidad and To­ba­go for the first quar­ter of 2025 (Jan­u­ary–March) stood at 4.9 per cent.

Im­bert stressed that the Op­po­si­tion will con­tin­ue to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions on be­half of work­ers.

“We have them in court and we go­ing to fight them and we go­ing to fight them. We not go­ing to give up. We go­ing to fight for the work­ers, we go­ing to fight for what is right and just and prop­er.”