Stephon Nicholas

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

To­ba­go maxi taxi dri­vers have ex­pressed sol­i­dar­i­ty with their Trinida­di­an coun­ter­parts, who with­held their ser­vices yes­ter­day, the first of three days of protests over in­dus­try con­cerns.

To­ba­go Maxi Taxi Dri­vers and Own­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Cloyd Williams had him­self led a protest two months ago over re­peat­ed late pay­ments for the trans­porta­tion of school­child­ren.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Williams said the strike ac­tion in Trinidad is ful­ly sup­port­ed and en­dorsed by his as­so­ci­a­tion.

He said To­ba­go op­er­a­tors face their own chal­lenges, in­clud­ing lack of a prop­er maxi-taxi hub, late pay­ments, non-pay­ments and short­age of bus­es dur­ing cruise-ship sea­son.

Williams said there have been some im­prove­ments in the time­li­ness of pay­ments since their last in­dus­tri­al ac­tion, but the crux of the is­sue has not been ad­dressed.

At a me­dia con­fer­ence in March, Ed­u­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Or­lan­do Kerr blamed an in­ef­fi­cient sys­tem for the tar­di­ness of pay­ments. He said the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly had on­ly re­ceived the in­voic­es for Jan­u­ary on March 2, not­ing the process to ver­i­fy the school trips was cum­ber­some. He said once every­thing was processed, funds are then re­leased to the Pub­lic Trans­porta­tion Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion (PTSC) and to cen­tral gov­ern­ment for pay­ment to the dri­vers.

Kerr said his di­vi­sion was ex­plor­ing the use of a glob­al po­si­tion­ing sys­tem (GPS) to fast-track the ver­i­fi­ca­tion of trips.

Yes­ter­day, Williams said the dri­vers will is­sue an ul­ti­ma­tum at a meet­ing with Kerr on Mon­day.

“Why not the THA deal with the fi­nan­cial side of the bar­gain and PTSC deals with the ac­tu­al run­ning of the pro­gramme, like the phys­i­cal as­pect, the in­spec­tion, the mon­i­tors, the check­ing of the bus­es and so on, and send our monies di­rect­ly to our ac­count? So that kind of bu­reau­cra­cy and red tape we wouldn’t have to go through.”

He said the is­sue has plagued dri­vers for sev­er­al years, with Kerr’s pre­de­ces­sors all un­able to change the pay­ment pro­ce­dure.

“We met with all the sec­re­taries be­fore: Ms Clau­dia Groome-Duke, Huey Cadette, Whit­ney Al­fred, Zor­isha Hack­ett, to solve the prob­lem, and no­body solved it. These are low-hang­ing fruit that can be han­dled. It is just about tak­ing time and get­ting to the root of the prob­lem.”

Asked whether strik­ing like their Trinidad coun­ter­parts was an op­tion, he said, “I am very op­ti­mistic. We are hop­ing this does not hap­pen. I think Or­lan­do Kerr is ca­pa­ble. I think we would get a re­sult. I don’t wan­na go in the strike part, but af­ter the meet­ing I am gonna meet with the as­so­ci­a­tion and we would know ex­act­ly what we are go­ing to do.”