Petrotrin of­fi­cial­ly launched its Me­di­a­tion Cen­tre on Tues­day at a joint­ly host­ed break­fast ses­sion with the Me­di­a­tion Board of T&T at the Pointe-a-Pierre Club. The launch was a key pro­gramme ac­tiv­i­ty for the fourth an­nu­al cel­e­bra­tion of Me­di­a­tion Week.

The Me­di­a­tion Cen­tre was con­cep­tu­alised as a proac­tive mea­sure to min­imise con­flict and pro­mote sta­bil­i­ty with­in its work­force by re­plac­ing the tra­di­tion­al ad­ver­sar­i­al ap­proach with more con­struc­tive re­la­tions. Recog­nis­ing the foun­da­tion­al im­por­tance of good em­ploy­ee re­la­tions for the or­gan­i­sa­tion's con­tin­ued pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, a bi­par­ti­san ap­proach was used for the es­tab­lish­ment of the Me­di­a­tion Cen­tre.

This ap­proach in­clud­ed col­lab­o­ra­tion with the three rep­re­sen­ta­tive bar­gain­ing units, the Es­tate Po­lice As­so­ci­a­tion (EPA), Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um Staff As­so­ci­a­tion (NPSA), and the Oil­fields Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU).

In his ad­dress at the launch of the Me­di­a­tion Cen­tre, Petrotrin pres­i­dent Khalid Has­sanali not­ed that the com­pa­ny is the first in T&T to im­ple­ment a cen­tre of this na­ture, mak­ing it a land­mark achieve­ment for the state owned en­ter­prise.It is an­tic­i­pat­ed that this ser­vice will fos­ter a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion for struc­tured di­a­logue as the pre­ferred ap­proach to con­flict res­o­lu­tion with­in the com­pa­ny.