Kay-Marie Fletch­er

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers’ Union (CWU) is call­ing for the im­me­di­ate re­moval of more se­nior man­agers at the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT).

Armed with plac­ards out­side the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters on Ed­ward Street, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day, dozens of ac­tive and re­tired work­ers held a protest cit­ing cor­rup­tion brew­ing in the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s helm.

Lead­ing the protest was CWU Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Joanne Ogeer, who said work­ers were dis­grun­tled and frus­trat­ed af­ter work­ing tire­less­ly for years to build the com­pa­ny, on­ly for man­age­ment to steal all the re­wards and de­stroy the in­tegri­ty of the or­gan­i­sa­tion in the process.

Just last week, TSTT’s for­mer CEO Lisa Agard re­vealed to a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) that she was muz­zled from com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the pub­lic in Oc­to­ber 2023, af­ter the mas­sive cy­ber­at­tack which saw cus­tomers’ da­ta leaked on the dark web.

The union al­so plead­ed with man­age­ment to pay retroac­tive salaries owed to work­ers and re­tirees.

Ogeer said, “Who is guard­ing the guards? No one. And that is what is go­ing on at TSTT. No new busi­ness, no vi­sion, no mis­sion. What is go­ing on? Get rid of these in­ept and mis­cre­ants from TSTT.

“If you could pay your­self bonus­es, if you could al­leged­ly spend $8 mil­lion in Car­ni­val and give your em­ploy­ees a bowl of corn soup, we say no to that. We want our retroac­tive salaries. We would not wait an­oth­er five-year pe­ri­od,” she added.

Ogeer said yes­ter­day’s ac­tion was on­ly the be­gin­ning, as the union is al­so putting pres­sure on the Gov­ern­ment, which it blames for a lost au­dit re­port com­plet­ed in Feb­ru­ary 2022.

Ogeer al­so con­demned both Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter Mar­vin Gon­za­les for ig­nor­ing the con­cerns of the work­ers.

Min­is­ter: We can’t be too con­cerned about the union protest­ing

But Gon­za­les was not too con­cerned about the protest when Guardian Me­dia ques­tioned him yes­ter­day.

Gon­za­les said, “These things, we can’t be too con­cerned about it. The union, if they be­lieve that protest­ing and demon­strat­ing in that way is go­ing to be a pow­er­ful av­enue to air their con­cerns and their grous­es, then they are free to do that. As a Gov­ern­ment we have to con­tin­ue to do our work and to work with all our stake­hold­ers to im­prove the lives of peo­ple, so there’s noth­ing to be con­cerned about.”

Ef­forts to con­tact Im­bert and TSTT’s ex­ec­u­tives were un­suc­cess­ful yes­ter­day.