Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for Princes Town, Bar­ry Padarath MP, says Gov­ern­ment in­tends to send home thou­sands of WASA em­ploy­ees for Christ­mas.

In an of­fi­cial state­ment on the mat­ter, MP Padarath—the Op­po­si­tion’s Shad­ow Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties—stat­ed that the re­cent cuts to Na­tion­al In­sur­ance, Cost of Liv­ing Al­lowance (CO­LA) and Salaries will come in­to ef­fect now that the 2024 Bud­get has been passed.

The Op­po­si­tion MP al­so not­ed that the busi­ness mod­el sub­mit­ted to the RIC for WASA a few months ago con­firms "the move to axe thou­sands of WASA em­ploy­ees".

MP Padarath re­vealed that he was aware of moves in­side of WASA to quick­ly re­duce the staff com­ple­ment, es­pe­cial­ly since the com­pa­ny’s 2024 al­lo­ca­tions could not meet the cur­rent de­mands for Salaries, CO­LA and NIS pay­ments.

The Princes Town MP is call­ing on the Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties, “to pub­licly state the Gov­ern­ment's pol­i­cy on cut­ting half of the staff at WASA.”

“The se­cre­cy in which these moves are shroud­ed is un­ac­cept­able,” MP Padarath said.

“Peo­ple have a right to know what is the sta­tus of their jobs, since most, if not all, have fam­i­lies to feed, mort­gages, rent and oth­er ma­jor ex­pens­es,” he added.

Ac­cord­ing to the MP, the Gov­ern­ment is, “play­ing with the lives of cit­i­zens since they are yet to com­pre­hen­sive­ly ar­tic­u­late in the pub­lic space where WASA is head­ing.”

He said the Gov­ern­ment. “was at­tempt­ing to down­play the sit­u­a­tion with the hope that em­ploy­ees at WASA will qui­et­ly walk away.”