In 21st Cen­tu­ry T&T banks are on­ly open dur­ing what are con­sid­ered to be nor­mal work­ing hours, ex­cept for one hour on Fri­day af­ter­noons. As a re­sult, all oth­er em­ploy­ees rou­tine­ly have to take time off "to go to the bank". This is es­pe­cial­ly irk­some at month-end, or oth­er pay­days, when "bro­ken to tief" em­ploy­ees have to rush to col­lect their pit­tance or at­tend to oth­er bank­ing trans­ac­tions. Need­less to say, the amount of pro­duc­tive work­ing time lost through this ac­tiv­i­ty is enor­mous.

Hats off to the lo­cal branch of one for­eign bank that has tak­en the lead in putting a stop to this non­sense. Let's hope that all oth­er banks in T&T soon fol­low suit. But there seems to be a huge stum­bling block to achiev­ing this. The trade union of­fi­cial­ly rep­re­sent­ing work­ers at some oth­er banks thinks that it is heart­less to try to drag T&T out of the dark ages. In fact, ac­cord­ing to one news­pa­per, they boast of in­dus­tri­al agree­ments with "strin­gent pol­i­cy guide­lines in place rul­ing out Sat­ur­day work."

Re­al­ly? I sin­cere­ly hope that these guide­lines are not carved on tablets of stone, and that the union con­cerned does not rep­re­sent nurs­es or bus dri­vers or re­fin­ery work­ers. They would earn the grat­i­tude and re­spect of all the cit­i­zens of this coun­try if, in­stead of stick­ing their heels in an­te­dilu­vian mud, they would move swift­ly to ne­go­ti­ate suit­able terms and con­di­tions cov­er­ing ex­tend­ed hours of work with those banks whose em­ploy­ees they rep­re­sent.

George Box­ill

San­ta Cruz