GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Jour­nal­ist

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Labour, Small and Mi­cro En­ter­prise De­vel­op­ment Leroy Bap­tiste says any work­er who los­es his or her job is a con­cern to him.

He made the com­ments to Guardian Me­dia af­ter be­ing asked to com­ment on last week’s an­nounce­ment that Loop News and Sports­max will be shut down, which will re­sult in near­ly 100 peo­ple across the re­gion, in­clud­ing T&T na­tion­als, los­ing their jobs.

“I am con­cerned with the re­trench­ment of any and all work­ers. I don’t know who wouldn’t be. A work­er, that’s how he takes care of his fam­i­ly, through his job, and that is a ma­jor con­cern to me al­ways,” Bap­tiste said.

On whether Gov­ern­ment could per­haps ab­sorb the af­fect­ed Loop work­ers in any pos­si­ble ar­eas, the min­is­ter said he would have to do re­search on this is­sue be­fore mak­ing any pro­nounce­ments.

How­ev­er, Bap­tiste re­it­er­at­ed that he sees his job as “pro­tect­ing peo­ple’s jobs.”

“As far as I can do and sure­ly to help per­sons, be­cause a job is every­thing to a work­er. That is all that he has. That is his way tak­ing care of him­self and his fam­i­ly and with­out which, we cre­ate a sit­u­a­tion that is un­healthy for the so­ci­ety, not just for him­self (the work­er),” he re­it­er­at­ed.

Re­gard­ing the rea­son for the clo­sure, Dig­i­cel, in a news re­lease, said it had re­flect­ed a strate­gic shift away from con­sumer-fac­ing me­dia to­ward scal­able, en­ter­prise-grade ser­vices un­der its Dig­i­cel Busi­ness arm.

“While we are proud of the lega­cy of Sports­Max and Loop News, we are now fo­cused on where we can cre­ate the great­est val­ue for our cus­tomers and the com­mu­ni­ties we serve,” Liam Don­nel­ly, group chief busi­ness of­fi­cer, had said.

The re­lease al­so not­ed that with the re­cent 100 per cent ac­qui­si­tion of Symp­tai, Dig­i­cel Busi­ness now of­fers an in­te­grat­ed suite of ICT ser­vices - in­clud­ing cy­ber, cloud, dig­i­tal me­dia, and com­pli­ance, sup­port­ed by strate­gic part­ner­ships and a grow­ing de­mand for end-to-end man­aged so­lu­tions across the re­gion.

Sports­max, which launched in 2002, had been a pop­u­lar chan­nel for re­gion­al sport­ing fans, show­ing lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al sports, in­clud­ing pop­u­lar in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments like the Olympics, the UE­FA Cham­pi­ons League, La Liga, and the In­di­an Pre­mier League. Dig­i­cel said the chan­nel will broad­cast for the last time on Au­gust 8.

On Ju­ly 8, Loop web­sites in all coun­tries post­ed a mes­sage ti­tled, “Loop News Bids the Caribbean a Grate­ful Good­bye.”

“They say all good things must come to an end, and so it is that af­ter 11 years of proud­ly serv­ing the Caribbean as a trust­ed me­dia part­ner, Loop News is to­day an­nounc­ing the end of our op­er­a­tions. While it wasn’t an easy choice, we be­lieve it is the right one for the mo­ment,” it said.