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Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Unions ready to defend workers forced to take vaccines—Duke

by

BOBIE-LEE DIXON
1345 days ago
20210712
PSA President Watson Duke address members on Facebook.

PSA President Watson Duke address members on Facebook.

Wat­son Duke, pres­i­dent of the Na­tion­al Trade Union Cen­tre of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NATUC) is call­ing on em­ploy­ers, to stop us­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s “Vac­ci­nate to Op­er­ate,” pol­i­cy to vi­o­late the hu­man rights of work­ers.

Duke made the call dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, in which he was re­spond­ing to Pres­tige Hold­ings’ “KFC work­ers must be vac­ci­nat­ed to re­turn to work stance.”

Duke who al­so heads the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA), said while NATUC and the PSA un­der­stood the trend of the world in the use of vac­cines to pre­vent death and slow the spread of COVID-19, it al­so un­der­stood the right of all hu­man be­ings to ac­cept or re­ject any­thing that goes in­to their body.

Re­spond­ing to Guardian Me­dia’s ques­tion on the ad­vice he would give to the mem­ber­ship of the PSA, should they face a sim­i­lar chal­lenge, Duke re­lat­ed, “If they are so threat­ened or com­pelled by the em­ploy­er take the COVID-19 vac­cine…any one of those vac­cines, please re­port it to the PSA im­me­di­ate­ly. We are go­ing to deal with it in the court of law.”

Duke swore, “The PSA stands ready and will­ing to de­fend, any sin­gle work­er in this coun­try and so does NATUC. We stand ready and will­ing to de­fend any work­er in this coun­try who is forced out of their job or de­nied en­trance in­to a job be­cause they have not been vac­ci­nat­ed.”

Mean­while, at­tor­ney-at-law, Bri­an Baig who agreed with Duke, told lawyers and trade unions, “get ready to de­fend work­ers.”

Baig said this was not a fight against Gov­ern­ment’s call to the pop­u­la­tion to be vac­ci­nat­ed, rather it was a mat­ter of en­sur­ing, peo­ple’s ba­sic hu­man rights were not be­ing in­fringed up­on.

He said, what­ev­er the rea­son for an em­ploy­ee or any per­son is, for not want­i­ng to take the vac­cine that was his or her right.

“Tak­ing the vac­cine should be left up to them, it should not be made manda­to­ry. Be­cause these per­sons, you can­not tell as to whether, will they have any re­ac­tions to the vac­cines, if they may have any health is­sues etc.”

He said while vac­cines were al­ways rec­om­mend­ed, no one should be forced to take a vac­cine and this would be very un­fair of any em­ploy­er to at­tempt to do so.

Baig said the guide­lines about vac­ci­na­tion in the work­place, was made clear by the pres­i­dent of the In­dus­tri­al Court Deb­o­rah Thomas-Fe­lix who said in ear­ly June, an em­ploy­er could not al­ter its terms and con­di­tions to make the COVID-19 vac­ci­na­tion manda­to­ry for em­ploy­ees.

“Un­less gov­ern­ment es­tab­lish­es laws that would make the COVID-19 vac­cine com­pul­so­ry, or­gan­i­sa­tions can­not de­mand that their work­ers take the vac­cine. What em­ploy­ers can do is en­cour­age work­ers to be vac­ci­nat­ed,” Baig ad­vised.


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