Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

In the wake of claims of mass un­em­ploy­ment un­der the UNC Gov­ern­ment, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo said sta­tis­tics show that more peo­ple had jobs in the first quar­ter of this year com­pared with the same pe­ri­od un­der the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).

Speak­ing at the Gov­ern­ment’s pre-bud­get con­sul­ta­tion at the Quar­ry Vil­lage Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre in Siparia on Tues­day, Tan­coo cau­tioned those present to be care­ful of in­for­ma­tion be­ing cir­cu­lat­ed by the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) on so­cial me­dia. “If you lis­ten to the PNM you will be­lieve that 60,000, 50,000, 40,000 (peo­ple lost their jobs), de­pend­ing on what side of the mouth they’re speak­ing to.”

The min­is­ter said that ac­cord­ing to re­cent da­ta from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice the num­ber of peo­ple with jobs in the first quar­ter of 2025 un­der the PNM was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 558,900, while for the same pe­ri­od this year un­der the UNC, 564,000 peo­ple have jobs.

“In what part of the world is 558,900 more that 564,000. In fact, there are 5,100 per­sons more em­ployed to­day than was em­ployed un­der the Peo­ple Na­tion­al Move­ment and that is a sta­tis­ti­cal fact.”

“I am say­ing all this to cau­tion you all about the mis­in­for­ma­tion. The agen­da of the PNM is to dis­rupt the flow of this coun­try. It’s to pre­vent your de­vel­op­ment.”

The min­is­ter said the econ­o­my is im­prov­ing.

“The coun­try is inch­ing for­ward from the down­ward tra­jec­to­ry it was in be­fore, and I can say that be­cause from a fi­nan­cial per­spec­tive we were down­grad­ed con­tin­u­ous­ly by Moodys and Stan­dard and Poor’s.”

How­ev­er, he said more in­vestors are ex­press­ing con­fi­dence in Trinidad and To­ba­go due to the per­for­mance of the Gov­ern­ment.

“Bil­lions of TT dol­lars has been com­ing af­ter a year and three months of this ad­min­is­tra­tion and the re­sults we are start­ing to see al­ready, and the re­sults that we will see more and more. We have more en­er­gy de­vel­op­ment now than we had af­ter ten years and $600 bil­lion spent.”

Ac­cord­ing to the CSO Labour Force Sur­vey Bul­letin dat­ed Ju­ly 24, 2026, an es­ti­mat­ed av­er­age of 564,000 peo­ple had jobs across all sec­tors in the first quar­ter of 2026. How­ev­er, over­all av­er­age em­ploy­ment across all in­dus­tries de­creased by one per cent com­pared with the fourth quar­ter of 2025.

The bul­letin al­so showed that the av­er­age num­ber of per­sons with­out jobs and seek­ing work in­creased by 27.2 per cent quar­ter-on-quar­ter, com­par­ing Q4 2025 with Q1 2026. Year-on-year, the num­ber of per­sons with­out jobs and seek­ing work in­creased by five per cent when Q1 2026 was com­pared with Q1 2025.