PSA pres­i­dent Wat­son Duke has ten­dered his res­ig­na­tion from the Pub­lic Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) ef­fec­tive De­cem­ber 31, 2021.

Duke's of­fer his res­ig­na­tion via a let­ter to the PSA ex­ec­u­tive on Mon­day.

"I Wat­son Solomon Duke, Pres­i­dent of the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go, here­by of­fer my res­ig­na­tion for ac­cep­tance by the Con­fer­ence of Del­e­gates to be ef­fec­tive from De­cem­ber 31st 2021."

He then went on to list his achieve­ments with the PSA.

"My Pres­i­den­cy be­gan in 2009 when Pub­lic Of­fi­cers had no ac­cess to HOC homes, a poor health plan, no job se­cu­ri­ty, small salaries and were be­ing ex­ploit­ed by politi­cians. How­ev­er, over the en­su­ing years, I was able to stop the de­struc­tion of the Civ­il Ser­vice by halt­ing the Trinidad and To­ba­go Rev­enue Au­thor­i­ty, Pass­port Au­thor­i­ty, Forestry Au­thor­i­ty and Li­cens­ing Au­thor­i­ty," he said.

He con­tin­ued: "I al­so placed in ex­cess of $5 bil­lion in work­ers pock­ets based on salary in­creas­es, al­lowances etc. I have com­menced the job eval­u­a­tion for over 1500 dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of jobs which is now ap­prox­i­mate­ly 25% com­plete. In ad­di­tion, I have cre­at­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for pub­lic of­fi­cers to en­ter the dis­cus­sions in the Board Room, at the lev­el of gov­er­nance, by en­ter­ing and be­com­ing suc­cess­ful in the Trinidad and To­ba­go po­lit­i­cal are­na."

He added: "Specif­i­cal­ly speak­ing, I am now the Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary of the THA, which is a body charged with cre­at­ing pol­i­cy and man­ag­ing the af­fairs of To­ba­go. As the PSA faces its fu­ture, it would re­quire a po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion to its po­lit­i­cal prob­lems.

• Nine (9) years with­out a salary in­crease, is a po­lit­i­cal prob­lem.

• Fail­ure to fill va­can­cies is a po­lit­i­cal prob­lem cre­at­ed by the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance.

• Fail­ure to ad­just al­lowances is a po­lit­i­cal prob­lem."

he said that as such, up­on ac­cep­tance, with ef­fect from De­cem­ber 31st, 2021, "I will be com­plete­ly com­mit­ting my­self to cre­at­ing a po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion to fix­ing these prob­lems for cit­i­zens of our coun­try. There­fore I hope my res­ig­na­tion is ac­cept­ed, so I can com­mit my­self to the same work, al­beit, on a dif­fer­ent lev­el."

The PSA has sched­uled a Spe­cial Con­fer­ence for Tues­day 21st De­cem­ber 2021 at 10 am to con­sid­er Duke's res­ig­na­tion of­fer and the fill­ing of the va­cant po­si­tion of Pres­i­dent pur­suant to Ar­ti­cle 37 (f) of the Con­sti­tu­tion of the PSA with ef­fect from Jan­u­ary 1st, 2022.