RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

Six years have passed and work­ers from Trinidad Ce­ment Lim­it­ed (TCL) say they have not been paid Cost of Liv­ing Al­lowance (CO­LA) and oth­er ben­e­fits since 2015.

Around 6 am, about 40 work­ers led by the Oil­fields Work­ers’ Trade Union gath­ered in the car park of TCL com­pound at Clax­ton Bay, hop­ing to get an up­date on their out­stand­ing ben­e­fits.

The gath­er­ing did not ham­per op­er­a­tions at the com­pa­ny.

Branch Sec­re­tary of the OW­TU Aki­ni Solomon told Guardian Me­dia that over 100 re­tirees and 200 per­ma­nent and ca­su­al work­ers are owed since 2015.

He said TCL has raised the price of ce­ment re­cent­ly but has failed to pay the work­ers their just dues.

“CO­LA is sup­posed to be a buffer for work­ers to cope with ris­ing in­fla­tion. They have left work­ers to suf­fer,” Solomon said.

 He added, “We want to know why mon­ey is not paid since 2015. This is a few months now we have been gath­er­ing here.

“We met in De­cem­ber 2021 and the gen­er­al man­ag­er said they had the mon­ey to pay, it is avail­able and this is March still has not been paid.” He not­ed that work­ers will con­tin­ue to keep up the strug­gle.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, TCL in a state­ment said, “A com­pre­hen­sive pack­age for all our em­ploy­ees with­in the bar­gain­ing unit is cur­rent­ly un­der re­view with the union and this item (CO­LA) is part of the dis­cus­sion.” 
The com­pa­ny said it “con­tin­ues to in­vite the union to meet to­wards the fi­nal­iza­tion of this new col­lec­tive agree­ment and re­mains con­fi­dent that a mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial po­si­tion would be achieved.”

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