Joseph Re­my, pres­i­dent of the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union (CWU), yes­ter­day was in­stalled as chair­man of the Board of Gov­er­nors of the Cipri­ani Col­lege of Labour and Co­op­er­a­tives Stud­ies.

Pre­sent­ing Re­my and oth­er board mem­bers with their in­stru­ments of ap­point­ment Min­is­ter of Labour Er­rol McLeod ad­vised them they were sub­ject on­ly to the gen­er­al di­rec­tions of the Gov­ern­ment and were not un­der the con­trol or di­rec­tion of any oth­er per­son or au­thor­i­ty.

He al­so told them their role was to "gov­ern and not man­age." He added: "In so do­ing, your re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is to pro­vide over­sight and di­rec­tion while ad­her­ing to cer­tain key prin­ci­ples, such as self­less­ness, in­tegri­ty, ob­jec­tiv­i­ty, ac­count­abil­i­ty, open­ness, hon­esty and lead­er­ship."Ad­di­tion­al­ly, I en­cour­age you to adopt an ap­proach of trust-based gov­er­nance which fo­cus­es on build­ing an ac­tive and an in­de­pen­dent board while at the same time de­vel­op­ing re­la­tion­ships with stake­hold­ers on the ba­sis of trust."

The min­is­ter told the new di­rec­tors they were re­spon­si­ble for prepar­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go's work force for a more di­verse and chal­leng­ing world of work. That, he said, was a cru­cial role in the "cur­rent en­vi­ron­ment of chang­ing work­place re­al­i­ties, fluc­tu­at­ing economies and in­evitable set­backs." McLeod said there was need to mo­ti­vate and en­cour­age work­ers to seize cur­rent and emerg­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties.

"This re­quires a greater fo­cus on re­tool­ing, re­train­ing and life­long learn­ing," he said. He was con­fi­dent the new board would do its best to de­vel­op the col­lege in­to the re­gion's pre­mier ter­tiary ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tion.

The oth­er mem­bers of the board are Nel­son Sin­nette, Jerome Teelucks­ingh, Ayns­ley Matthews, Stephen Thomas, Trevor John­son, Ash­ford Sankar, Gre­go­ry Jones and Anand Ti­wari.