Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Work­ers at state-owned Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) have threat­ened to take their protest for bet­ter wages straight to the doors of the home and of­fice of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar.So said Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU) pres­i­dent Joseph Re­my yes­ter­day.Re­my, who led work­ers in a noisy protest out­side TSTT's San Fer­nan­do head­quar­ters on St James Street, said work­ers want the Prime Min­is­ter's in­ter­ven­tion in the union's on­go­ing wage ne­go­ti­a­tions.

"We are say­ing to the Prime Min­is­ter that TSTT is a state en­ti­ty work­ing for the eco­nom­ic in­ter­est of T&T and you have an oblig­a­tion to step in and have these ne­go­ti­a­tions re­solved, oth­er­wise we will con­tin­ue this protest ac­tion and the next call is at your of­fice. We had enough of TSTT," Re­my de­clared.Re­my, speak­ing with re­porters, said work­ers would con­tin­ue to "pres­sure" man­age­ment for a favourable set­tle­ment to ne­go­ti­a­tions.

He said TSTT has of­fered work­ers three per cent which Re­my de­scribed as "dis­grace­ful, dis­re­spect­ful and con­temp­tu­ous.""You can­not look at work­ers who have con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the prof­itabil­i­ty of this com­pa­ny and tell them that all they de­serve is three per cent wage in­crease. We are to­tal­ly against that," he said.Re­my said work­ers were be­ing paid 2007 salaries in 2013 and that was un­ac­cept­able.He said the In­dus­tri­al Court has re­solved the is­sue of Cost of Liv­ing Al­lowance for se­nior and ju­nior staff.

Re­my said the work­ers do not want to protest, but man­age­ment has forced them to do so by their lack of ac­tion."We want to be at our job sites and at our desks do­ing our jobs so TSTT would re­main the num­ber one tele­com provider in T&T and in the re­gion," he said.