Maxi op­er­a­tors in To­ba­go have tak­en le­gal ac­tion against the Pub­lic Trans­port Ser­vice Cor­po­ra­tion and the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion In­no­va­tion and En­er­gy for what they have de­scribed as un­rea­son­able and un­fair em­ploy­ment con­tracts.

But of­fi­cials of the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly and PTSC seem to have op­pos­ing po­si­tions on the mat­ter.

The group to­talling thir­ty-one own­ers is be­ing col­lec­tive­ly rep­re­sent­ed by At­tor­ney Janelle Ram­sa­roop of Mar­tin A George and Com­pa­ny who said many of the own­ers have been en­gaged for more than twen­ty years, and dur­ing that pe­ri­od there has been no is­sue un­til the PTSC stepped in.

“The new con­tract now seeks to ex­pel the ser­vices of those who are at the age of 60 and that will al­so be detri­men­tal to those maxi con­ces­sion­aires who are over the age of 60.”

The new con­tract be­ing pro­posed by the PTSC, ac­cord­ing to Ram­sa­roop, is on­ly for a term of two years. And the dri­vers, she said, find the of­fer un­fair “af­ter op­er­at­ing for some­thing like thir­ty- two years of op­er­at­ing peace­ful­ly with the di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion.”

This is how­ev­er not the first time the maxi op­er­a­tors have tak­en ac­tion as the group protest­ed back in Au­gust 2017.

Back then the dri­vers re­fused to trans­port school chil­dren at the start of the new school term and called on the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion to im­prove ac­count­ing sys­tems, as pay­ments were be­ing re­ceived con­tin­u­ous­ly late.

Sim­i­lar ac­tion was tak­en in No­vem­ber 2019, when the To­ba­go maxi op­er­a­tors showed sol­i­dar­i­ty with their Trinidad coun­ter­parts when pay­ments were three months over­due.

When asked to com­ment on the is­sue, Sec­re­tary in the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion In­no­va­tion and En­er­gy Kelvin Charles said that “there is no new arrange­ment and the sit­u­a­tion is cur­rent­ly be­ing re­viewed.” How­ev­er, chair­man of the PTSC Ed­win Good­ing said steps must be tak­en to reg­u­lar­ize the op­er­a­tions in or­der to pro­tect dri­vers and stu­dents.

“We have been try­ing since I’ve been here for the last three years with To­bag­on­ian dri­vers be­cause re­mem­ber they are trans­port­ing peo­ples’ chil­dren and we feel we need to have some agree­ment with them and they have al­ways ob­ject­ed to it.”

Good­ing said there is no “ma­l­in­tent” be­hind the new arrange­ment as the op­er­a­tors in Trinidad have a sim­i­lar arrange­ment. He said the board of di­rec­tors was ad­vised to stream­line op­er­a­tions by procur­ing the ser­vices of dri­vers in­di­vid­u­al­ly and as far as he is aware the age lim­it re­quired for the po­si­tion is 65.

The PTSC board chair­man said while he hasn’t of­fi­cial­ly seen the doc­u­ments re­lat­ed to the le­gal ac­tion, he isn’t sure what is go­ing to hap­pen now since schools are closed and there are no chil­dren to trans­port.