Rishard Khan

Re­porter

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

A fac­tion of the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) is air­ing con­cerns over its lead­er­ship deny­ing the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer’s pro­posed four per cent in­crease for the pe­ri­od 2014 to 2019.

They are now call­ing for the union’s lead­er­ship to ac­cept the of­fer.

While they agree the of­fer is woe­ful­ly in­ad­e­quate, it should have been ac­cept­ed so ne­go­ti­a­tions on the 2020 to 2022 pe­ri­od could be­gin.

“A half of a loaf is bet­ter than no loaf,” Jude David­son, chair­man of the Point Fortin Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion’s PSA branch, said dur­ing a press con­fer­ence on Thurs­day.

In a re­lease on Wednes­day, the PSA said dur­ing a gen­er­al coun­cil meet­ing, 73 per cent vot­ed to con­tin­ue re­ject­ing the of­fer while 23 per cent vot­ed against.

It added that 77 per cent vot­ed to im­me­di­ate­ly sub­ject the spe­cial tri­bunal’s de­ci­sion to im­pose a ten-year set­tle­ment to Ju­di­cial Re­view.

Read­ing from the In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Act, PSA mem­ber Jen­nifer Fred­er­ick said the spe­cial tri­bunal is clear­ly work­ing with­in the am­bit of the law in its de­ci­sion.

“What is the High Court go­ing to say that is go­ing to change that? Even if, let’s say the High Court says, in its Ju­di­cial Re­view, that the spe­cial tri­bunal can­not say for a ten-year pe­ri­od for the four per cent, all that is go­ing to hap­pen, in my log­i­cal opin­ion, they are go­ing to go back to the spe­cial tri­bunal and all of that time all of us still sit­ting on 2013 salary,” she said.

For­mer PSA gen­er­al sec­re­tary and cur­rent gen­er­al coun­cil rep­re­sen­ta­tive for St Ann’s Hos­pi­tal, Oral Saun­ders, said the word on the ground among mem­bers and oth­er pub­lic sec­tor work­ers was that the CPO’s of­fer should have been ac­cept­ed.

While the PSA’s poll re­sults say oth­er­wise, Saun­ders con­tends that’s be­cause the vote isn’t fair.

He ex­plained that de­spite the COVID-19 health emer­gency end­ing, gen­er­al coun­cil meet­ings are still be­ing held vir­tu­al­ly where less than 50 per cent of the coun­cil at­tend.

“We are of the opin­ion that the process is flawed. It can be ma­nip­u­lat­ed to give a re­sult that the ad­min of the said meet­ings pre­fer. We are al­so con­tend­ing that this polling process is not a sci­en­tif­ic poll and there­fore should not be used for such im­por­tant is­sues,” he said.

Saun­ders said he at­tend­ed the meet­ing where the most re­cent poll was done and there were on­ly some 37 at­ten­dees, in­clud­ing its ex­ec­u­tive, out of the 80 to 90 mem­bers of the gen­er­al coun­cil mem­bers.

How­ev­er, PSA pres­i­dent Leroy Bap­tiste dis­missed the groups claims as a bid for pop­u­lar­i­ty, not­ing that Saun­ders pre­vi­ous­ly vied for pres­i­den­cy nu­mer­ous times but lost.

“I can as­sure you that the PSA is con­duct­ing its af­fairs con­sis­tent with its con­sti­tu­tion and the de­ci­sions are made ... and these are peo­ple who can­not con­vince the mem­bers of the gen­er­al coun­cil or else­where to agree with them and then they go about crit­i­cis­ing there­after,” he said.