Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Em­ploy­ees of the MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy staged a protest yes­ter­day to press their de­mands for man­age­ment to re­scind warn­ing let­ters.

They claimed that dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, their work­ing shifts were ad­just­ed, but now man­age­ment wants them to re­turn to the old sys­tem which they in­sist­ed can­not be done with­out con­sult­ing with their union. How­ev­er, while the union was in dis­cus­sion with the com­pa­ny, the work­ers were served with warn­ing let­ters.

Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) First Vice Pres­i­dent Fe­l­isha Thomas, who ad­dressed the work­ers out­side the en­trance to MIC in Ma­coya, said ne­go­ti­a­tions for a new col­lec­tive agree­ment were can­celled on Fri­day pend­ing the re­scind­ing of the warn­ing let­ters.

“What we got on Fri­day evening was an­oth­er promise from the man­age­ment to re­scind the let­ters, not the ac­tu­al re­scind­ing of those let­ters, so we are here this morn­ing with the work­ers. The work­ers are here wait­ing for their let­ters from man­age­ment.”

She added: “While the union has been ne­go­ti­at­ing with the man­age­ment re­gard­ing hours of work, the man­age­ment went ahead and is­sued warn­ing let­ters to staff re­gard­ing the same hours of work that we are dis­cussing at the ta­ble. We see that as meet­ing and treat­ing in bad faith and we told the man­age­ment that we see it as a mech­a­nism to try and force the hand of the union, which we will not tol­er­ate.”

Chair­man of MIC In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, Pro­fes­sor Clé­ment Im­bert, who walked out to meet with the work­ers and union rep­re­sen­ta­tives, told Guardian Me­dia: “The in­dus­tri­al agree­ment has cer­tain hours, and we agreed to those hours but now they want to fur­ther re­duce them, and we don’t agree. That’s the gist of it.

“The warn­ing let­ters were is­sued af­ter the pan­dem­ic had been of­fi­cial­ly de­clared over. We told them that they had to re­turn to the nor­mal work­ing hours that we had agreed up­on. We in­formed the work­ers that it would take some time for the let­ters to reach them. How­ev­er, they know that we have agreed to re­tract the warn­ing let­ters.’”

The union and MIC of­fi­cials met and are ex­pect­ed to meet again on June 14. The work­ers are ex­pect­ed to have their warn­ing let­ters re­scind­ed to­day.