The Bank­ing, In­sur­ance and Gen­er­al Work­ers' Union (BIG­WU) says State agen­cies in T&T con­tin­ue to be in­sen­si­tive to the pop­u­la­tion. The union, in a state­ment yes­ter­day, drew ref­er­ence to the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion's (HDC) clear­ing close to 100 acres of farm land at Cres­cent Gar­dens, Mau­si­ca Road, D'Abadie, on Mon­day to make way for a new hous­ing project. BIG­WU said it was "flab­ber­gast­ed" that the same politi­cians who con­demned the for­mer Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) gov­ern­ment for sim­i­lar ac­tiv­i­ty al­lowed Mon­day's clear­ing of land in Mau­si­ca to take place.

The state­ment said: "State agen­cies in T&T are in­sen­si­tive to work­ers, trade unions, farm­ers and peo­ple in gen­er­al." The union said HDC and Min­is­ter of Hous­ing and the En­vi­ron­ment Roodal Mooni­lal showed ul­ti­mate dis­re­spect to the farm­ers who worked to pro­vide food se­cu­ri­ty for T&T. BIG­WU said it held Mooni­lal to­tal­ly ac­count­able for the de­struc­tion of hun­dreds of acres of food to con­struct hous­ing.

It said the in­sen­si­tiv­i­ty of state agen­cies was al­so vis­i­ble in the Min­istry of Health's po­si­tion to de­ny the Med­ical Pro­fes­sion­als As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (MPATT) ac­cess to the re­port on the in­quiry in­to the death of Crys­tal Boodoo-Ram­soomair, who died af­ter a C-sec­tion de­liv­ery at San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal.

"Min­is­ter of Health Therese Bap­tiste-Cor­nelis con­tin­ues to treat MPATT, which is the legal­ly recog­nised trade union for doc­tors, with scant cour­tesy, dis­re­spect and in­sen­si­tiv­i­ty," the union al­so stat­ed.