Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

Ex­ec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the Oil­field Work­ers Trade Union (OW­TU), Ernesto Ke­sar, is urg­ing Labour Min­is­ter Stephen Mc­Clashie to ful­fil his promise to help more than 100 re­trenched Stork Tech­ni­cal Ser­vices work­ers re­ceive their out­stand­ing sev­er­ance pay­ments.

Fol­low­ing the re­trench­ment of the work­ers late last year, Kezar said, they wrote to the min­is­ter and met with him last month re­gard­ing the non-pay­ment. He claimed the min­is­ter promised to in­ter­vene by the end of this month if the mat­ter re­mained un­re­solved.

“All of our mem­bers are now home, and they can’t get their mon­ey be­cause Stork and the Gov­ern­ment, they tie up their mon­ey in BIR be­cause of some so-called law, and I chal­lenge the is­sue of law be­cause those com­rades who I rep­re­sent they are not with­in the thresh­old. The thresh­old be­ing $500,000 or over. None of them will get that amount of mon­ey in sev­er­ance,” Kezar stat­ed.

How­ev­er, he said, the mon­ey was “tied up” in fi­nan­cial bu­reau­cra­cy at the Board of In­land Rev­enue (BIR).

“The Min­is­ter of Labour said that if by the end of the month this thing don’t sort out, he will in­ter­vene, Ke­sar said.

“So we are call­ing on him to in­ter­vene this morn­ing, but we’re al­so call­ing on his friend, his part­ner, Mr Colm Im­bert, sir, if you nev­er do any­thing good for work­ers in your life, I want you to do this. In­struct the peo­ple in the Min­istry of Fi­nance, BIR, to re­lease the monies for these work­ers and give them their mon­ey.”

He fur­ther ex­plained, “In a sit­u­a­tion where a work­er is be­ing sent home via re­trench­ment, in this case, they be­ing paid ex-gra­tia, there is a thresh­old where sev­er­ance is con­cerned of $500,000.

“When the Ca­roni work­ers were sent home, once your sev­er­ance doesn’t cross $300,000, it would have been tax-free. In this case, when the Petrotrin work­ers went home, they would have in­creased the thresh­old to half a mil­lion dol­lars. So that once your pack­age didn’t cross $500,000, you weren’t taxed.”

The union leader stressed the ur­gency of re­solv­ing the mat­ter be­fore the up­com­ing elec­tion sea­son.

“Now this is elec­tion sea­son, and the work­ers are fear­ful that if the date for elec­tion is called, they may nev­er get their mon­ey, and we told the min­is­ter that no­body is over the thresh­old,” he added.

Kezar, who is the UNC can­di­date for the Point Fortin con­stituen­cy, crit­i­cised the gov­ern­ment’s han­dling of the is­sue, call­ing it “bu­reau­crat­ic non­sense,” and ac­cus­ing the ad­min­is­tra­tion of be­ing the “worst gov­ern­ment” when it comes to labour rights.

He al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of vic­tim­is­ing those who op­posed its labour poli­cies.

“We are say­ing here this morn­ing, enough is enough,” said Kezar, who de­clared that he would not rest un­til the work­ers get their just due.

He added that the union’s po­lit­i­cal stance against the Gov­ern­ment was dri­ven by is­sues like these.

“This is why some unions have tak­en a po­lit­i­cal po­si­tion against the Gov­ern­ment,” Ke­sar said.

Kezar, who was ac­com­pa­nied by for­mer Stork work­ers, was speak­ing with re­porters in front of the In­dus­tri­al Court on St Vin­cent Street in Port-of-Spain, where he is rep­re­sent­ing them in a sep­a­rate mat­ter.

He said that mat­ter in­volved 24 per­ma­nent Stork work­ers who lost their jobs in 2020 dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic un­der the guise of re­trench­ment.

“So we have the case here where we chal­lenge the re­trench­ment wasn’t a re­trench­ment, but a ter­mi­na­tion.”

Fol­low­ing the hear­ing, Kezar con­firmed that the mat­ter was ad­journed, with both par­ties agree­ing to try and set­tle the is­sue with­in the next two months. If no agree­ment is reached, the mat­ter will pro­ceed to tri­al.