Lee An­na Ma­haraj

leean­na.ma­haraj

@guardian.co.tt

East­ern Com­mer­cial Lands (trad­ing as Tru Valu Su­per­mar­ket) yes­ter­day is­sued a state­ment rub­bish­ing claims made by the Bank­ing, In­sur­ance and Gen­er­al Work­ers Union (Big­wu) that it has been mis­treat­ing its em­ploy­ees dur­ing the hol­i­day pe­ri­od.

Last week BIG­WU’s deputy pres­i­dent Ja­son Brown held a press con­fer­ence in which he lev­elled sev­er­al al­le­ga­tions against Tru Valu.

“As a re­sult of these com­ments and their po­ten­tial for harm­ing the Com­pa­ny’s brand and rep­u­ta­tion, Tru Valu would like to take this op­por­tu­ni­ty to ad­dress these al­le­ga­tions, and to em­phat­i­cal­ly state to the peo­ple of T&T that the said union rep­re­sen­ta­tive’s com­ments con­sti­tute gen­er­al mis­in­for­ma­tion, and do not re­flect an ac­cu­rate pic­ture of the sit­u­a­tion,” the re­lease stat­ed.

Tru Valu said as “an equal op­por­tu­ni­ty em­ploy­er” it has nev­er and will nev­er take ad­van­tage of its work­ing re­la­tion­ship with its em­ploy­ees by en­gag­ing in any prac­tice or prac­tices that can be con­sid­ered as detri­men­tal to the health, safe­ty and well­be­ing (whether per­son­al or pro­fes­sion­al) of its staff.

“Tru Valu has nev­er and will nev­er ros­ter any em­ploy­ee for a 24-hour shift. The nor­mal shift is eight hours. How­ev­er, as has be­come the cus­tom­ary prac­tice over re­cent years, dur­ing the week lead­ing up to Christ­mas, there may be some shifts last­ing up to 10 hours. The ad­di­tion­al time for such shifts is paid at over­time rates ac­cord­ing to the col­lec­tive agree­ment,” it stat­ed.

Tru Valu stat­ed that overnight shifts will at­tract dou­ble time af­ter mid­night, but are re­quired on two nights at the Trinci­ty branch to en­able the re­stock­ing of the store, and the du­ra­tion of this shift is eight hours.

“All overnight shifts, as well as the Box­ing Day shifts (9 am to 4 pm), are over­sub­scribed by Tru Valu em­ploy­ees due to the pre­mi­um rates, and all po­ten­tial em­ploy­ees for these shifts vol­un­teered their time. Again, we cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly state that no one is ros­tered nor is any­one man­dat­ed to work on the afore­men­tioned shifts. The de­ci­sion to open for these ex­tend­ed hours was made af­ter in­ter­est from the em­ploy­ees was re­ceived, and these terms were agreed up­on last year. Man­age­ment has made no mod­i­fi­ca­tions fur­ther to the said orig­i­nal agree­ment,” it stat­ed.

Tru Valu al­so ac­cused the union rep­re­sen­ta­tive of ver­bal­ly as­sault­ing a man­ag­er at the su­per­mar­ket af­ter an un­planned union meet­ing was stopped.

“Of all the claims raised by the Big­wu rep­re­sen­ta­tive, on­ly one is cor­rect – that be­ing the claim of late no­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Com­pa­ny’s hol­i­day op­er­at­ing hours, which was dis­sem­i­nat­ed in No­vem­ber 2022. At the time, man­age­ment saw no is­sues with this de­ci­sion as there were no changes to the hours and the terms from the 2021 hol­i­day sched­ule,” it stat­ed.

Guardian Me­dia made sev­er­al at­tempts to reach out to Brown for com­ment but calls went unan­swered.